A New Look at Gender Effects in Participation and Occupation Choice

In this paper we evaluate the extent to which changes over time in women’s labour market destinations are due to characteristics, on the one hand, and prices, on the other. Multinomial and nested logit methods are used to analyse US data for 1970 and 1990, and the results are compared. The latter method, which has not previously been employed in the present context, alleviates problems due to the strong assumption in simpler models of the independence of irrelevant alternatives, and provides much additional useful information.