Essays in Female Labor Supply in Ecuador

Abstract

This is a solo-authored dissertation that contains three papers that each examines a specific aspect of the labor supply in the Ecuadorian labor market between 2007 and 2017. The chapters of this dissertation all use data from the National Survey of Employment, Unemployment, and Underemployment; in Spanish Encuesta Nacional de Empleo, Desempleo y Subempleo (ENEMDU) to empirically examine labor supply in the Ecuadorian labor market, specifically female labor supply. The first chapter analyzes the impact on labor supply of the last increment of the cash transfer under the Human Development Credit (BDH) program in Ecuador. This study employs a difference-in-differences approach, comparing poor households that receive the transfer with poor households that are not part of the program. Empirical results reveal that households that are part of the program, on average, increased their labor supply by 2.5 hours at the intensive margin and by 7.23 percentage points at the extensive margin. More importantly, results reveal that women increased their labor supply at the intensive and extensive margin by 1.65 hours, and by 5.63 percentage points respectively, while results for men are not statistically significant. The second chapter explores married women’s labor supply elasticities in Ecuador between 2007 and 2017. Specifically, the focus of this chapter is to examine how married women’s hours of work respond to their income from labor, and non-labor income. Overall, empirical results suggest that between 2007 and 2017, hours wage elasticities increased, whereas hours non-labor income elasticities and participation non-labor income elasticities appear to had a minimum increment. The third chapter adds to the second by analyzing the labor supply responses of single women in Ecuador between 2007 and 2017. Like in the second chapter, this chapter examines how single women’s hours of work respond to their income from labor and non-labor income on the intensive and extensive margin. Empirical results show that during the last decade, the labor supply responsiveness of single women in Ecuador has remained relatively constant.