The rise of low-skill service employment: The role of dual-earner households

Abstract

This paper unveils an important but unexplored channel for the growth of low-skill ser-vice employment between 1960 and 2010: the spillover from dual-earner households. In particular, we analyze the cross-city association between variation in dual-earner house-holds and employment growth in home production substitutes. To address concerns about endogeneity, we use the fact that married working women were extremely concentrated on administrative support occupations, while their birth places were heterogeneously dis-tributed. Our results show that one more dual-earner couple creates 0.3 low-skill service jobs in local economies, and the effect mainly comes from the home production service sector.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.