Hosny Zoabi

Effects of Trade on Female Labor Force Participation

This paper uncovers a counter-intuitive effect of international trade on female labor shares: whenever trade expands, sectors intensive in female labor, female labor shares drop and vice versa. According to our key assumption a rising capital labor ratio closes the gender wage gap. The paper’s mechanism operates as follows. Expansions of sectors intensive in female labor come along with contractions of sectors intensive in male labor. These contractions imply that male labor reallocates to sectors intensive in female labor. The capital labor ratio in the latter sectors drops, which widens the gender wage gap and causes a decrease in aggregate female labor shares. Based on instrumented U.S.-Mexican trade flows, we provide empirical evidence in support of our theory.

When Stolper-Samuelson Does Not Apply: International Trade and Female Labor

Whenever a country specializes on industries that use female labor intensively, its female labor force participation should increase. This intuition, which bases on the Stolper-Samuleson Theorem, may fail in a three-factor, two-good model. We develop a model where capital, male and female work are distinct factors of production. We follow an established assumption and postulate that capital accumulation closes the gender wage gap. In this setup, the Stolper-Samuleson based intuition fails necessarily: the gender wage gap widens in countries that specialize on sectors intensive in female labor, and vice versa.

Why did Rich Families Increase their Fertility? Inequality and Marketization of Child Care

A negative relationship between income and fertility has persisted for so long that its existence is often taken for granted. One economic theory builds on this relationship and argues that rising inequality leads to greater differential fertility between rich and poor. We show that the relationship between income and fertility has flattened between 1980 and 2010 in the US, a time of increasing inequality, as high income families increased their fertility. These facts challenge the standard theory. We propose that marketization of parental time costs can explain the changing relationship between income and fertility. We show this result both theoretically and quantitatively, after disciplining the model on US data. We explore implications of changing differential fertility for aggregate human capital. Additionally, policies, such as the minimum wage, that affect the cost of marketization, have a negative effect on the fertility and labor supply of high income women. We end by discussing the insights of this theory to the economics of marital sorting.

Trade Liberalization, Female Labor Force Participation and Economic Growth

This research argues that the interaction between international trade and female labor force participation has played a significant role in the process of development. The main concern of our study is to show how differences in per household capital stocks, via international specialization, affect household choice of female labor force participation and fertility, and how these decisions, in turn, feed back and affect the accumulation of capital. Interestingly, and in contrast to conventional wisdom, our theory suggests that specialization in females comparative advantage sectors expands these sectors but hinders female labor force participation, while specialization in males comparative advantage sectors generates the mirror image. The reason is that men are assumed to have an advantage in the labor market and therefore are always formally employed. As a result, specialization of the economy in the females comparative advantage sector drives men into this sector and female out of formal employment.