Journal of Economic Psychology 11 (1990) 85-99 North-Holland 85 zyxwvutsrqpo PROJECTING FEMALE LABOR SUPPLY: THE RELEVANCE OF SOCIAL NORM CHANGE * A. Georges L. ROMME University of Limburg, Maastricht, The NetherIan& Received October 31, 1988; accepted November 2, 1989 The relevance of labor supply research for long-term labor market policy is rather low. This article is an attempt to improve on this situation in the case of female labor force participation. It focuses on labor supply decisions under fundamental uncertainty, that is, imperfect ability to cope with imperfect information. In such a framework, it is rational to resort to behavioral rules in the form of social norms offered by reference groups. Focusing on a simple model for forecasting purposes, the framework is operationalized by means of logit analysis of the labor supply of a number of Dutch female birth cohorts. 1. Introduction The motivations and decisions leading to labor market participation have been a longstanding research interest among economists. Re- cently, there has been considerable activity in formulating and estimat- ing life-cycle models of labor supply (e.g., MaCurdy 1981; Browning et al. 1985; Colombino and De Stavola 1985; Maloney 1987). The rele- vance for long-term labor market policy, however, is rather low, due to the unreliability of its results. Especially the under-estimation of par- ticipation rates for women is notorious. 1 * A draft of this paper appeared in P. vanden Abeele, Proceedings of the 13-th annual IAREP-col- loquium, volume III, Leuven/Brussels, 1988. The research leading to this article was initiated by Joan Muysken. The author wishes to acknowledge Maarten Vendrik, the editor and two reviewers for their helpful comments. Author’s address: A.G.L. Romme, University of Limburg, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. ’ For projection methods of the Bureau of Labor Statistics see Sum (1977) and Fullerton (1982). Kok and De Neubourg (1986) provide an overview of the methods and problems of labor force projection in Germany, USA, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Sweden and the OECD. 0167-4870/90/$03.50 0 1990 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)