The Impact of Home Appliances on Employment Decisions of Married Women: New Evidence from Cross-Sectional Data

One of the leading explanations for the drastic increase in the labor force participation of married women observed in developed countries during the 20th-century, stresses the importance of technological progress in the household sector (e.g., Greenwood, Seshadri, and Yorukoglu (2005)). In this paper, we provide an assessment of this theory by (i) building a simple choice-theoretic model of employment decisions of married women and (ii) analyzing the changes over time in home appliances ownership for households where women work versus households where women do not work, using individual-level data from the 1960 and 1970 US censuses. First, in our model, not all women who buy home appliances decide to work. Second, in both census samples, the fraction of households that own appliances is slightly higher for women who do not work compared to women who work. Moreover, the magnitude of the increase in home appliances ownership between 1960 and 1970 is similar for women who work and women who do not work. We argue that the theory proposed by Greenwood, Seshadri, and Yorukoglu is not consistent with these facts. We propose a simple alternative explanation where the demand for home appliances depends on the demand for home production but is unrelated to the work decision. We show that our theory is consistent with the facts, both at the micro- and aggregate level.