The mass out of labor force: Three essays on housewives

This dissertation consists of three essays on those outside the labor force, with a specific emphasis on housewives in Turkiye based on the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics-II classification over the period 2014-2019. The first essay provides a descriptive analysis of those outside the labor force. The second and third essays empirically investigate the determinants of housewives and the impact of economic policies on these determinants, respectively. The first essay examines the labor force status given the classification provided by labor force statistics to identify the reasons and demographic characteristics presented by those outside the labor force. Studies on the labor market in Turkiye commonly focus on issues such as unemployment, employment, or gender inequality. This descriptive analysis aims to contribute to the literature by analytically examining the reasons provided by the mass outside the labor force. The findings reveal that the largest segment outside the labor market by reason consists of housewives, and this group is even larger in number than the total population of some countries in Europe. The second essay investigates the determinants of the tendency to stay outside the labor force as a housewife in Turkiye. Considering potential heteroscedasticity, the estimation is made using the panel data robust standard errors approach. Alongside the economic factors, the results indicate that social factors are crucial as well in explaining women's tendency to stay outside the labor force as housewives. The third essay investigates how monetary and fiscal policies affect the impact of the determinants obtained from the second essay using the Two-Stage Least Squares technique to address potential endogeneity problems. The estimation results show that monetary and fiscal policies play a financial relief role for households. However, these policies remain limited in affecting the socio-demographic factors that influence the labor force participation status of housewives.