In the United States, women's labor force participation has been persistently below that of men's for decades. This Commentary describes three contributors to this divide -- way in which States taxes opposite-sex married couples, how social security benefits are allocated, and cost childcare reviews economic literature quantifying their impact on women.

We estimate a semiparametric dynamic panel data model by the local linear kernel method and we interpret the slope of the nonparametric component function as a varying slope coefficient. Thus, the slope coefficient is a smooth, but otherwise unknown, function of some of the regressors. A Monte Carlo experiment is reported to examine the finite sample performance of the local linear estimator. W...

Do Downward Private Transfers Enhance Maternal Labor Supply? Evidence from around Europe Drawing on a theoretical model of downward private transfers with endogenous labor supply and recursive econometric models based on 2317 mother-daughter pairs from the 2003 SHARE data on 10 European countries, we investigate the impact of private transfers on the career choices of transfer-receiving young m...

The correlation between female labor force participation rate (FPR) and total fertility rate (TFR) across developed countries has switched from negative to positive. This paper provides a structural explanation of the historical pattern via changes in substitutability between mother’s direct childcare and indirect market care. Analysis of a life-cycle model of married women’s labor supply and f...

This paper documents “sharp retirement”—retirement accompanied by a discontinuous decline in labor supply—across three data sets, which previous literature found difficult to explain. I propose and estimate a life-cycle labor supply model with habit persistence wherein sharp retirement can be explained by workers quitting “cold turkey.” In much the same way that one might quit smoking, workers ...

A Public Good Version of the Collective Household Model: An Empirical Approach with an Application to British Household Data In this paper we consider an empirical collective household model of time allocation for twoearner households. The novelty of this paper is that we estimate a version of the collective household model, where the internally produced goods and the externally purchased goods...

We investigate how perceived meaning influences labor supply. In a laboratory setting, we manipulate the perceived meaning of simple, repetitive tasks and find a strong influence on subjects’ labor supply. Despite the fact that the wage and the task are identical across the conditions in each experiment, subjects in the less meaningful conditions exhibit reservation wages that are consistently ...

We investigate how perceived meaning influences labor supply. In a laboratory setting, we manipulate the perceived meaning of simple, repetitive tasks and find a strong influence on subjects’ labor supply. Despite the fact that the wage and the task are identical across the conditions in each experiment, subjects in the less meaningful conditions exhibit reservation wages that are consistently ...

Using longitudinal survey data collected in Kenya, this paper estimates the longer-term impacts of antiretroviral therapy (ART) on the labor supply of treated adults and their household members. Building upon previous work in Kenya, data collected from 2004-2006 indicate that early evidence on the short-run impacts of ART tends to be upheld over the long-term as well. The results show that the ...

Analyzing a homogenous household setting with endogenous fertility and endogenous labor supply, we demonstrate that moving from joint taxation to individual taxation and adapting child benefits so as to keep fertility constant entails a Pareto improvement. The change is associated with an increase in labor supply and consumption and a reduction of the marginal income tax, while the child benefi...