by Calculated Risk on 4/08/2014 08:59:00 PM

On Sunday I listed a few possible reasons for the decline in the labor force participation rate for prime-working age men. One of the reasons I suggested was more men were being "Mr. Mom". I looked for some research on this, and sure enough the percent of stay-at-home father families has increased from 0.7% in the 1968 to 1979 period, to 2.5% in the 2000 to 2012 period (percent of married families).

Meanwhile the prime-working age men participation rate fell from an average of 95.0% (1968 to 1979) to 90.3% (2000 - 2012). Clearly "Mr. Mom" has been a factor.

From Karen Z. and Amit Kramer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The Rise of Stay-at-Home Father Families in the U.S.: The Role of Gendered Expectations, Human Capital, and Economic Downturns

Stay-at-home father families in which the mother is the sole- or primary-earner of income (Chesley 2011) represent a small but growing percentage of two-parent families in the United States. These families, in which the mother is the sole income earner, are estimated to make up three to four percent of two-parent households in the United States (Fields 2002; Kramer, Kelly, and McCulloch forthcoming). The higher participation rates of women in the labor force, as well as the impact of the 2009 Great Recession, which have affected men’s employment more than women’s (Harrington, Van Deusen, and Ladge 2010), combined with greater projected growth rates in occupations that are dominated by women, such as health and education (Boushey 2009), suggest that the proportion of stay-at-home father families in the U.S. is likely to increase.

The other factors too as I noted in the post on Sunday.

Wednesday:
• At 7:00 AM ET, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) will release the results for the mortgage purchase applications index.

• At 10:00 AM, Monthly Wholesale Trade: Sales and Inventories for February. The consensus is for a 0.5% increase in inventories.

• At 2:00 PM, the FOMC Minutes for the Meeting of March 18-19, 2014.