This paper econometrically analyzes the relationship between public spending and gendered urban employment in China for the period 1999-2009. Proponents of gender-sensitive public policies suggest that spending on healthcare and education may increase long-run growth and women’s relative employment via the expansion of paid care work (increasing labor demand) and reductions in unpaid labor (inc...

Joint custody reforms increase the bargaining power of men within marriage and alter the allocation of resources within the household. The empirical evidence suggests that these shifts reinforce the traditional division of household labor, with both positive and negative effects. On the positive side, marriage and fertility rates rise, and male suicides and domestic violence decline. On the neg...

The trend toward increasing inequality in family income in the United States since the late 1960s is well documented. Among key possible explanations for this increase are rising dispersion in individual earnings, changes in female labor supply decisions, and changes in family composition and living arrangements. We analyze the contribution of these factors to changes in family income inequalit...

The wage elasticities of labor supply at the participation and hours worked margins are focal parameters of interest for understanding the work disincentive effects of taxes and transfers and the attendant design of optimal tax and transfer schemes. In this paper I use sweeping changes in U.S. tax policy, welfare policy, and the demand for skill over the 1980s and 1990s to identify the wage ela...

In Germany, individuals in need of long-term care receive support through benefits of the long-term care insurance. A central goal of the insurance is to support informal care provided by family members. Care recipients can choose between benefits in kind (formal home care services) and benefits in cash. From a budgetary perspective, family care is often considered a cost-saving alternative to ...

I document differences in labor supply between a set of Latin American countries and the U.S. in the period 1990-2005. These differences are mostly explained by large differences in female labor supply. In the U.S. the female labor force participation was 69% by 1990, while in Brazil and Mexico was 39% and 37%, respectively. Females began to participate more in the labor market of these countri...

Strong differences of opinion about the labor supply elasticity prevail. One camp infers that the aggregate labor supply elasticity is large because big fluctuations in aggregate hours of work occur in response to small fluctuations in workers’ productivity over the business cycle (Prescott 2005). Another camp points to estimates of low labor supply elasticities from microeconometric studies of...

When minimum down payments for durable purchases constrain a household’s debt, a persistent wage increase generates a liquidity shortage. This limits the income effect, so hours worked grow. This is the financial labor supply accelerator, which links labor supply to collateralized household borrowing. The mechanism generates a positive comovement of labor supply and household debt, whose streng...

In many European countries, increasing female labor supply is an explicit policy goal, e.g. to alleviate financial pressure on public social security systems caused by demographic change. At the same time, the stagnating female labor force participation has become a point of discussion in the US (Blau and Kahn, 2013). A large range of policies explicitly aim at establishing equal labor market o...