Granting married women more control over their own resources increases their likelihood to participate in the labor market significantly.

Does stigma decrease unemployment benefit uptake? We find that stigma has a significant negative effect on benefit uptake in times of economic crises.

In this paper, we show that mothers' labor force participation declines following a labor market shock that reduces the availability of part-time jobs, while fathers and women without children remain unaffected.

This paper analyses the impact of the modernization of the Swiss marital law in the 1980s on married women’s labor force participation in Switzerland. The reform of the law comprised multiple measures to foster the equality between husband and wife within the marriage. The Swiss people voted on the reform in a referendum in 1985, accepting the new marital law. Hence at the time of the vote, it was revealed that the Swiss people hold more liberal attitudes than those represented by the old version of the law. The new marriage law was then implemented in 1988. For our analyses, we classify municipalities into conservative and liberal municipalities depending on the referendum voting results in the municipality. Overall, we find that from 1988 on, i.e., after the new marital law has been implemented, married women in conservative municipalities are catching up with married women in liberal municipalities in terms of labor force participation in the first year after getting married. We do not see a strong direct response of married women’s employment in conservative relative to liberal municipalities between 1985 and 1988, i.e., after the referendum revealed relatively more liberal national norms of the Swiss people than what has been represented by the old marital law but prior to the law change.