Rogerson and Wallenius (2013) draw an incorrect inference about a labor supply elasticity at an intensive margin from premises about an option to work part time that retiring workers decline. We explain how their false inference rests on overgeneralizing outcomes from a particular example and how Rogerson and Wallenius haven’t identified an economic force beyond the two – indivisible labor and ...

This study investigates the structure and trends of the labor market in China in the economic transition. Based on two large-scale repeated surveys, we cover a variety of rarely explored issues related to the labor market in China. These issues include labor market participation and various employment such as second jobs and post retirement employment, labor supply issues like working hours, wo...

The dominant feature of the female labor force in the United States across the twentieth century is its striking and large increase. But continuity in the increase may be an illusion. Women’s paid employment may have been permanently altered by certain events. The 1940s have been viewed as such a watershed decade. Labor force changes from 1940 to 1945 were huge. Around 14 million men were mobil...

The canonical model of labor supply is extended to account for subsistence needs and a frequently rigid division of labor within families (gender). Various theories that have been put forward are thus reconciled, in particular with respect to the distinct work choices of the poor. The model predicts negative labor supply elasticities for secondary workers at low wage rates and positive ones at ...

Previous empirical papers find that single mothers respond to EITC changes through the labor force participation (extensive) margin, not through the hours (intensive) margin. This is not predicted by standard labor supply models. My paper investigates labor supply effects of the EITC with a structural model, augmented with two factors that limit workers’ hours choices: costs of working and diff...

Manning proposes that the ‘traditional’ monopsony model, once regarded as an analytical curiosity, be adopted as a widely-applicable description of firms’ behavior in labor markets. In Manning’s view, search frictions in the labor market generate upwardsloping labor supply curves to individual firms even when firms are small relative to the labor market. Thus a model of ‘monopsonistic competiti...

This paper uses CPS data to examine changes in single women’s labor supply elasticities in recent decades. Specifically, the authors investigate trends in how single women’s hours of work and labor force participation rates responded to both wages and income over the years 1979–2003. Results from the base specification suggest that over the observation period, hours wage elasticities decreased ...

This paper examines how Japanese wives react to their husbands’ involuntary job loss and tests the existence of complementarity of a wife’s labor supply to her husband’s. Utilizing panel data on Japanese households from 1993 to 2004, we found that wives’ labor supply is stimulated when husbands suffer involuntary job loss. The detailed statistics show that not only do working wives raise their ...

This paper studies pre-eligibility-age labor market disincentives created by the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. Asset and income limits might induce individuals nearing the eligibility age to work less. We exploit states’ supplementation of federal SSI benefits to estimate the effects of SSI on pre-retirement labor supply, using SIPP data. We find some evidence that generous SSI be...

This paper examines the potential causes of the “ripple effect” of minimum wages. This wage spillover is thought to result from labor demand substitution: where the rising minimum increases the demand for more-skilled workers who become relatively inexpensive. However, the rising minimum also affects the relative wages across hedonically distinct occupations because it lowers compensating wage ...