This paper studies the life-cycle labor supply of three cohorts of American women, born in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. We focus on the increase in labor supply of mothers between the 1940s and 1950s cohorts. We construct a lifecycle model of female participation and savings, and calibrate the model to match the behavior of the middle cohort. We investigate which changes in the determinants of labor supply account for the increases in participation early in the life-cycle observed for the youngest cohort. A combination of a reduction in the cost of children alongside a reduction in the wage-gender gap is needed. (JEL D91, J16, J22, J31)

We specify a life-cycle model of consumption, labor supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions. We distinguish different sources of risk, including shocks to productivity, job arrival, and job destruction. Allowing for job mobility has a large effect on the estimate of productivity risk. Increases in the latter impose a considerable welfare loss. Increases in employment risk have large effects on output and, primarily through this channel, affect welfare. The welfare value of programs such as Food Stamps, partially insuring productivity risk, is greater than the value of unemployment insurance which provides (partial) insurance against employment risk. (JEL D91, J22, J31, J61, J64, J65)

In this online appendix we discuss a number of issues that we left out of the main text for reasons of space. Section A describes further details of the model and solution method. Section B provides further information on the data, including comparability between our data and alternative sources, the quality of self-reported measures, and the consumption imputation. Section C describes the estimation method more fully. Section D provides extensive further robustness checks of the estimation results, particularly of the exclusion restrictions, and of the assumed ways that health enters the model. Section E provides more details on the robustness of our policy experiments to changing the distribution of the noisy signal that the government observes and to changes in risk aversion.

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