ABSTRACT
In a seminal paper Sorensen and McLanahan analysed married women’s economic dependency using public use samples from the decennial US censuses 1940-1980. Gustafsson and Bruyn-Hundt analyse data for Germany, Sweden and The Netherlands and find that married women on average contribute a small fraction of joint family earnings. Romantic love stories in the 1950s ended with a kiss confirming the decision to marry with the implicit assumption that the couple then lived happily ever after. The troubles of combining work and family were not in a young woman’s perception. Most studies of women’s labour supply include variables on family composition, number of children and children’s age Killingsworth & Heckman, Gustafsson, Vlasblom. The difference between the two countries was caused both by smaller labour force participation and shorter hours of work for labour force participants for German mothers in comparison to Swedish mothers for similar hourly wages and human capital characteristics before mothering.
