Since women’s labor supply is positively affected by their own wages and negatively
affected by men’s wages, the concurrent slowdowns in both women’s relative wage and
employment increases in the 1990s suggest the possibility that the latter is a labor supply
response. In this paper, we shed light on the connection between wages and labor supply by
using March Current Population Survey (CPS) data to investigate women’s labor supply
behavior over the 1980-2000 period. We focus on married couples in light of a long tradition in
labor supply research that emphasizes the family context in which work and consumption
decisions are made (Blundell and MaCurdy 1999). Moreover, changes in the labor supply
behavior of married women have driven the changes in labor supply for women overall. Chiefly