Two key issues in the literature on female labor supply are: (1) if persistence in employment status is due to unobserved heterogeneity or state dependence, and (2) if fertility is exogenous to labor supply. Until recently, the consensus was that unobserved heterogeneity is very important, and fertility is endogenous. But Hyslop (1999) challenged this. Using a dynamic panel probit model of female labor supply including heterogeneity and state dependence, he found that adding autoregressive errors led to a substantial diminution in the importance of heterogeneity. This, in turn, meant he could not reject that fertility is exogenous. Here, we extend Hyslop (1999) to allow classification error in employment status, using an estimation procedure developed by Keane and Wolpin (2001) and Keane and Sauer (2005). We find that a fairly small amount of classification error is enough to overturn Hyslop’s conclusions, leading to overwhelming rejection of the hypothesis of exogenous fertility.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.