Gender specific effects of exports on work decisions in Indonesia. Issue 6 (18th August 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Chesnokova, Tatyana; Rupa, Jesmin; Sim, Nicholas
• Is Part Of: Journal of international trade & economic development. Volume 28:Issue 6(2019)
• Page Start: 686
• Page End: 711
• Publication Date: 2019-08-18
• Subjects: Exports -- labor force participation -- gender effects -- women empowerment; C13 -- D70 -- O12; International trade -- Periodicals; Economic development -- Periodicals; 337
• DOI: 10.1080/09638199.2019.1582685
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0963-8199

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper proposes a new household panel data approach to study the gender specific effects of exports on labor force participation and household work.We construct a novel measure, the Export Exposure index, by combining information about exports and the respondent's location. The index enables us to address a key identification issue, which is to estimate the effect of exports that is unconfounded by unobserved household characteristics and macroeconomic shocks. We construct a simple model to show that if women have a comparative disadvantage in market work relative to men, and if an increase in exports increases the gender wage gap, Labor force participation of the women would be negatively related to exports. We find that in Indonesia, exports encourage women to substitute their time away from paid labor participation towards unpaid house or family work, but have no statistically significant effect on men, as predicted by our model.