Own- and cross-price elasticities of (cohabiting) married women's labour supply in South Africa

How sensitive are married women to what they could potentially earn when deciding whether to enter the labour market? How sensitive are they to what their husbands earn? And, what do these sensitivities look like under prevailing conditions of high and persistent female unemployment? Answering these questions can potentially tell us something about female labour force participation as well as how conjugal couples divide up paid and unpaid work. A well-established result from the developed world is that strong own- and cross-price participation elasticities for married women’s labour supply with respect to their husband’s wages have attenuated towards zero over the past 50 years. Recent evidence from the US suggests the own-price effect in particular has then levelled out in the decade of the 2000s. We undertakethis analysis for South Africa, an upper-middle-income country characterized by high levels of female unemployment and wage inequality. We focus on married (or cohabiting) women