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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2451/26100
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| Title: | "Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility" |
| Authors: | Fogli, Alessandra
Fernandez, Raquel |
| Keywords: | female labor force participation
fertility
cultural transmission
immigrants
neighborhoods
networks
family |
| Issue Date: | Apr-2005 |
| Series/Report no.: | EC-05-07 |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of culture on important economic outcomes by using
the 1970 Census to examine the work and fertility behavior of women
30-40 years old, born in the U.S., but whose parents were born
elsewhere. We use past female labor force participation and total
fertility rates from the country of ancestry as our cultural proxies.
These variables should capture, in addition to past economic and
institutional conditions, the beliefs commonly held about the role of
women in society, i.e. culture. Given the different time and place, only
the beliefs embodied in the cultural proxies should be potentially
relevant to women’s behavior in the US in 1970. We show that these
cultural proxies have positive and significant explanatory power for
individual work and fertility outcomes, even after controlling for
possible indirect effects of culture (e.g., education and spousal
characteristics). We examine alternative hypotheses for these positive
correlations and show that neither unobserved human capital nor networks
are likely to be responsible. We also show that the effect of these
cultural proxies is amplified the greater is the tendency for ethnic
groups to cluster in the same neighborhoods. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/26100 |
| Appears in Collections: | Economics Working Papers
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