Intergenerational Transmission and the Impact of Mothers-in-Law in the Turkish Labor Market: The Case of Izmir

This paper examines the presence of intergenerational transmission in the Turkish labor market with respect to the association between labor market activity of women and work experience of their mothers-in-law. By utilizing a representative unique household labor force survey from İzmir, this study provides statistically significant results for the association above even after taking into account many socioeconomic factors such as parental education and the household characteristics. Our major findings show that the presence of a working mother-in-law increases the probability of women's labor force participation rate by 11 percentage points. Our results are robust when we use different dependent variables such as employment rate and being a regular employee in non-agricultural sector. The labor market experience of women's own mothers turns out to affect rather indirectly through human capital investment for their daughters. The impact of working mothers-in-law on women's labor market activity is not homogeneous across all educational categories. This association is particularly significant among women with lower educational attainment (at most 8 years of schooling).