Public Employment Shocks and Female Labor Force Participation in Palestine: Evidence from Quasi-Natural Experiment

By the end of the Second Intifada, which took place during the 2000-2004 period, the Palestinian government disproportionately expanded security personnel, overwhelmingly hiring males. This expansion has come at the expense of employing young educated females in the public education. In this paper, I utilize the employment decline in public education as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the causal effect of changes in labor demand on the labor force participation of the latter cohort The findings show that the employment contraction of public education decreases the probability of their labor force participation.