The Role of Source- and Host-Country Characteristics in ... - CReAM

positive. As a result, the proportion of women who work in that region increases. 5
While it is not the aim of this paper to provide an empirical test of these theories,
their main implications can be easily applied to female immigrant labor supply decisions.
By observing other working women in the host country, female immigrants might change
their attitudes and beliefs regarding women’s role in the workplace and gradually adapt
to the behavior of native women. The higher thereby, all else equal, the proportion of
working women in the host country, the more positive the beliefs about work and the
higher the probability that an immigrant women decides to participate in the labor market.
Assessing the relationship between host-country FLFP and the labor supply of female
immigrants might therefore provide some insights into whether immigrant women change
their attitudes and beliefs and assimilate to the labor market behavior of natives.
While – since the seminal work of Chiswick (1978) – a sizable body of literature has
evolved that examines immigrant-native assimilation patterns within a given destination
country, studies that analyze immigrants in different resident countries to provide evidence
on the role of host-country characteristics in immigrant behavior are scarce. The only
study that aims at assessing the effect of host-country FLFP on female immigrant labor
supply is Kok et al. (2011) for the Netherlands. However, as their study is based on
immigrants within a single country, their identification of the host-country effect does not
rely on differences in FLFP rates between immigrants’ countries of residence, but on the
difference in levels and speed of adjustment between different cohorts of immigrants. In
particular, they use the increase in the FLFP rate over successive birth cohorts of native
women as a proxy for Dutch culture. The authors’ results suggests that both differences
in home-country female participation and the trend in native female participation, as
a measure for host-country culture, have an impact on the participation of immigrant
women. The authors conclude from these results that host-country participation is at
least as important as home-country participation in affecting immigrants’ labor supply
decisions.
Although a positive relationship between host-country FLFP rates and immigrant
women’s labor supply might be indicative of immigrant women adapting to the culture of
the host country and therefore to the work behavior of natives, other explanations are
also possible. As a given woman’s decision to participate in the labor market does not
only depend on her preferences and beliefs, but also on a whole series of economic and
institutional factors that may differ across countries, FLFP at the aggregate level will not
only reflect a country’s cultural environment, but its economic and institutional conditions
5 The main difference between the two models lies in the assumption regarding the driving force behind
female labor supply dynamics. While Fernández (2012) assumes that women start with biased, pessimistic
beliefs about working women which become more positive as participation rises, Fogli and Veldkamp
(2011) assume that women start with unbiased beliefs, but face uncertainty about the effects of maternal
employment on their children, which falls as information accumulates.
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