Labor Force Participation by Married Women in the United States: Results from the 1917/19 Cost-of-Living Survey and the 1920 PUMS

Evan Roberts, University of Minnesota

This paper reports preliminary research on using the 1917/19 Cost of Living Survey (COLS) in conjunction with the 1920 PUMS to model married women's labor force participation. The COLS has been widely used to study American labor market behavior in the early 20th century. However, it is not clear how representative the sample is of the urban population it sampled. I compare the characteristics of households and individuals in the 1920 census to the COLS. The COLS includes income information, but not ethnicity or race, whereas the 1920 census has ethnicity and race variables, but no income information. Using the overlapping variables I create a synthetic sample which has 1920 census weights, and includes both ethnicity/race and income data. I use this new sample to model married women's behavior, and compare these to published results used the unweighted COLS.