| dc.description.abstract | This paper carries out an empirical analysis to answer how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the labor force in Norway. More specifically how it impacted the female labor force in actual hours worked. This research has been done in many countries and the results tend to have a negative impact on women labor force. I am choosing Norway as my research country because Norway is ranked number three in the worked in gender equality and ranked as the best country to live in for women (Forum, 2021). As a result, the impacts of COVID-19 on the labor supply of women may be smaller than what has been found in other countries with a higher degree of gender inequality.
First, I display a review of earlier research done in this field and discuss how economic theory is used to explain the difference between genders in the labor force. Second, I look into how Norway handled the pandemic. This paper studies the following research question: did COVID-19 have differential impact of labor supply of male employees than female employees?
By using data from the Norwegian Labor Force Survey (AKU), I employ a difference- in-difference design and study the change in hours worked between male and female employees before and after the introduction of the pandemic. I find that the actual working hours for men decreased more than those of women after 2019. Overall, ac- tually working hours decreased after the pandemic. However, men do still work more actual hours than women.There is a disparity in hours worked between men and women, COVID-19 did have a differential impact on labour supply for men and women. Other factors like education and what type of industry you worked in had some say when it came to actual hours worked. | |
