Abstract
This paper examines whether labor law reform in Taiwan depressed female earnings and employment during the 1980s. The new provisions regulating working hours and providing maternity benefits raise the relative cost of employing women. The researchers use a simple competitive labor market model to measure the impact of the protective measures on female employment, wages, and hours worked. Using repeated cross-sections of household survey data, they estimate a polychotomous choice model with selectivity, exploiting the variation across covered and uncovered industries to identify the law-reform effects. Results of a policy simulation show that enforcing the regulations caused growing disparity in the gender earnings differential.