Employment Transitions of Women in India: A Panel Analysis

Sudipa Sarkar (), Soham Sahoo and Stephan Klasen

No 11086, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This study analyses employment transitions of working-age women in India. The puzzling issue of low labour force participation despite substantial economic growth, strong fertility decline and expanding female education in India has been studied in the recent literature. However, no study so far has looked into the dynamics of employment in terms of labour force entry and exit in this context. Using a nationally representative panel dataset, we show that women are not only participating less in the labour force, but also dropping out at an alarming rate. We estimate an endogenous switching model that corrects for selection bias due to initial employment and panel attrition, to investigate the determinants of women's entry into and exit from employment. We find that an increase in income of other members of the household leads to lower entry and higher exit probabilities of women. This income effect persists even after controlling for the dynamics of asset holding of the household. Along with the effects of caste and religion, this result reveals the importance of cultural and economic factors in explaining the declining workforce participation of women in India. We also explore other individual and household level determinants of women's employment transitions. Moreover, we find that a large public workfare program significantly reduces women's exit from the labour force.

Keywords: female labour force participation; employment transition; panel data; sample selection; attrition; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J21 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Published - published in: World Development, 2019, 115, 291-309

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11086.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Employment transitions of women in India: A panel analysis (2019)
Working Paper: Employment Transitions of Women in India: A Panel Analysis (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp11086

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().