A Dynamic Tobit Model of Female Labor Supply

Abstract

A dynamic Tobit model is applied to longitudinal data to estimate the hours of work of married women in Sweden during 1992-2001. Hours of work are found to be negatively related to fertility. Other characteristics of married women are also found to have an effect on labor supply. Inter- temporal labor supply decisions seemed to be characterized by a substantial amount of unobserved heterogeneity, first order state dependence and serially correlated error components. The findings suggest that the first order state dependence and unobserved heterogeneity are very sensitive to the initial condition.