Bonus material: The rise of working women in big cities was also mirrored in a growing demand for political change. The support for female suffrage (here measured by signatures in Sweden's largest suffrage petition) was highest in big cities and closely associated with FLFP rates across parishes.
Check out the full paper for much more: cepr.org/publications...
We lastly use death records to examine mortality effects. Historically, big cities had notoriously high mortality rates. Indeed, male migrants in Stockholm died two years earlier than their brothers; in contrast, female migrants saw no negative effect on lifespan!
Interestingly, the increase in employment in large cities is matched almost one-to-one by decreases in marriage and childbearing. This appears permanent and not due to temporary delays. Also replicates in the US!
As expected, the FLFP effect is driven mainly by service sector work. The figure below shows the tight link between service sector size at the destination and female migrants’ employment.
Using new US census links by @kaseybuckles.bsky.social et al, we find that this pattern replicates in the US as well! This is very cool as we ran this long after writing up Swedish results.
Big cities are different for women and men! Positive employment effect only at the very top for women, with no difference by size for men.
This figure shows our main result: how employment differs for women migrating to parishes of different size, compared to non-movers.
To tease out the role of big cities, we focus on migrant women and compare them to their non-migrating sisters. This requires following women over time in census data, which is not possible in most countries as many women change names after marriage. Luckily, Swedish censuses record maiden names!
A structural shift towards services (providing “respectable” jobs for women) is seen as a key driver of FLFP. While a post-WWII phenomenon in the aggregate, we show that big cities were 50 years ahead of other regions in terms of service sector size.
