This work presents new evidence on the effect of husbands’ health insurance on wives’ labor supply. Previous cross-sectional studies have estimated a significant negative effect of spousal coverage on wives’ labor supply. However, these estimates potentially suffer from bias due to the simultaneity of wives’ labor supply and the health insurance status of their husbands. This paper attempts to ...

In-Work Benefits for Married Couples: An Ex-Ante Evaluation of EITC and WTC Policies in Italy This paper investigates labor supply and redistributive effects of in-work benefits for Italian married couples using a tax-benefit microsimulation model and a multi-sectoral discrete choice model of labor supply. We consider two in-work benefit schemes following the key principles of the Earned Income...

In this paper we discuss a general framework for analyzing labor supply behavior in the presence of complicated budgetand quantity constraints of which some are unobserved. The individual’s labor supply decision is viewed as a choice from a set of discrete alternatives (jobs). These jobs are characterized by attributes such as hours of work, sector specific wages and other sector specific aspec...

We study the Danish unemployment experience 1905-92 using a common trends model with cointegration constraints. To justify the identifying assumptions about the cointegration vectors and the common trends we present a simple macroeconomic model of the labor market. The model determines the long run behavior of labor productivity, employment, unemployment, real product and real consumer wages. T...

This paper shows that existing estimates of labor supply elasticities place a tight upper bound on risk aversion in an expected utility model. I derive a formula that relates the coefficient of relative risk aversion (γ) to the ratio of the income elasticity of labor supply to the wage elasticity, holding fixed the degree of complementarity between consumption and leisure. The degree of complem...

We study the wage structure during economic transition in the context of Chinese cities and examine the effect of China’s urban housing reforms on the urban wage structure (1988-2005). We find that these reforms, which untied access to housing from state-sector employment, shifted approximately 17% of the labor force from the state sector to the private sector, increasing the private sector lab...

The positive correlation between hourly wages and height, which results in higher labor supply of tall individuals, is well-documented in the literature. Accepting the utilitarian perspective and assuming that height does not aff ect utility implies that linking income taxes to height is welfare improving. This paper argues that height might not only aff ect an individual’s income but also util...

This paper investigates the impact of various economic measures on child labor in an open dual economy. We construct a small open economy model with heterogeneity of households in terms of location of residency and income. A part of households with low income supplies child labor when they reside in the rural area. The measures we will mainly consider are trade policies (e.g. import tariff and ...

We thank reviewers from the Committee on Population at the National Academy of Sciences for useful comments. We also thank Vijaya Ramachandran for excellent research assistance and for especially helpful discussions and suggestions. The research reported here is part of the NBER's research program in Labor Studies. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors and not those of the National Bu...