Sébastien Montpetit will defend his thesis on Friday 5 July at 14:00 (Auditorium 5, Building TSE and Online)
Title: « Essays on Female Labor Force Participation in Developed Countries»
Supervisors: Philippe BONTEMS and François POINAS
To attend the conference, please contact the secretariat Christelle Fotso Tatchum
Memberships are:
- Philippe BONTEMS : Senior Researcher, INRAE/TSE-R Supervisor
- François POINAS : Assistant Professor TSE - University of Toulouse Capitole Co supervisor
- Marie CONNOLLY : Professor in Economics, University of Montréal Rapporteure
- Jean-William LALIBERTE : Associate Professor in Economics, University of Calgary Rapporteur
- Marie-Louise LEROUX : Professor in Economics, University of Montréal Examinatrice
Abstract :
Over the past century, the rise in women's participation in the economy has been one of the most significant transformations in the labor market. This thesis presents three essays studying the trade-offs women face in their participation choices and their consequences for social welfare. The first chapter focuses on universal childcare provision and its positive impacts on mothers' labor force participation while the second and third chapters investigate the joint decision of integrating economically and preserving their culture for Muslim women.
In the first chapter, co-authored with Pierre-Loup Beauregard and Luisa Carrer, we evaluate the welfare effect of universal childcare provision. Leveraging the introduction of universal low-fee daycare in Québec in 1997 and novel data on daycare coverage rates within Québec, we show that the positive impacts on maternal labor supply and childcare use are larger in areas where daycare expanded more. Thus, childcare availability, rather than just the price decrease, is also responsible for the observed behavioral responses. In the second part of the chapter, we estimate the benefit-to-net-cost ratio of the policy while notably taking into account its non-marginal nature. We estimate mothers' utility gains using a model of maternal labor supply and childcare choices, incorporating non-pecuniary benefits for mothers, such as non-monetary costs of childcare use, and childcare availability. Structural estimates indicate that mothers' benefits are more than 3.5 dollars per dollar of net government spending - more than twice that obtained when solely focusing on earnings gains. As such, our findings suggest that non-pecuniary benefits for mothers are a key component of welfare gains of universal policies. Counterfactual simulations suggest that channelling more resources towards opening spots, rather than lowering prices, could have led to even larger social returns.
In the second chapter, Antoine Jacquet and I study the relationship between veiling behavior and economic participation using the largest sample of Muslim women in France. We demonstrate a significant negative relationship between veiling and economic participation, which contrasts with the existing economic theory of veiling in Muslim-majority countries. We show that a model which also accounts for reduced economic opportunities for veiled women is consistent with this finding. We then develop and estimate a discrete-choice model of veiling and economic participation to disentangle the various motivations behind the joint decision. Our results indicate that veiled women are less active not due to religious preferences, but rather because their benefits of economic participation are lower. Additionally, our results emphasize the significance of personal religious motives in the decision to veil, rather than community-based religious pressure. This calls into question the rhetoric used to justify policies that restrict the wearing of religious symbols in France.
In the third chapter, I estimate the effect of prohibiting the wearing of the Islamic veil for pupils on educational attainment of Muslim women. In a difference-in-difference analysis, I find that the directive to school principals to ban the veil in French schools in 1994 induced a large decline in high-school completion rates of Muslim women. There is further evidence that the effect on the intensive margin of education lasts in the medium-run. The data suggests that the ban operates through increased experiences of discrimination against Muslims and mistrust of the French school rather than through a change in Muslim parents' investments into their daughters' education. I show how using an inappropriate measure of the treatment group as in previous work substantially alters conclusions on the impacts of the policy. In the long-run, cohorts affected by the ban display lower levels of religiosity.
