Estimating Labor Supply Responses and Welfare Participation: Using a Natural Experiment to Validate a Structural Labor Supply Model In this paper, we formulate and estimate an economic model of labor supply and welfare participation. The model is estimated on data on single men from Quebec drawn from the 1986 Canadian Census. Budget sets for each work-welfare combination – accounting for income...

This paper examines the impact of the introduction of the Medicaid program on labor supply decisions among single women in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I use a differences-in-differences-in-differences methodology to estimate the effect of Medicaid on eligible women's labor force participation, using variation in the timing of Medicaid implementation across states and in eligibility across d...

We examine the effects of employment-contingent health insurance (ECHI) on married women's labor supply following a health shock. First, we develop a theoretical framework that examines the effects of ECHI on the labor supply response to a health shock, which suggests that women with ECHI are less likely to reduce their labor supply in response to a health shock, relative to women with health i...

Poor rural households in Malawi often chose to supplement their income through additional casual work on other farms (“ganyu” labor). Based on data from the Second Integrated Household Survey for 2004, we explore the potential objectives and determinants of ganyu supply. We find a confirmation of the neoclassical theoretical hypothesis whereby households use ganyu as a consumption smoothing opt...

Estimating the Firm’s Labor Supply Curve in a “New Monopsony” Framework: School Teachers in Missouri In the context of certain dynamic models, it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage. Using this property, we estimate the average labor supply elasticity to public school districts in Missouri. We take advanta...

Why Is the Public Sector More Labor-Intensive? A Distortionary Tax Argument Government-run entities are often more labor-intensive than private companies, even with identical production technologies. This need not imply slack in the public sector, but may be a rational response to its wage tax advantage over private firms. A tax-favored treatment of public production precludes production effici...

Why Is the Public Sector More Labor-Intensive? A Distortionary Tax Argument Government-run entities are often more labor-intensive than private companies, even with identical production technologies. This need not imply slack in the public sector, but may be a rational response to its wage tax advantage over private firms. A tax-favored treatment of public production precludes production effici...

This paper analyzes optimal linear taxes on labor income and savings in a twoperiod life-cycle model with ex ante identical households, endogenous leisure demands in both periods, and general processes of skill shocks over the life cycle. We demonstrate that the Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem breaks down under risk. Capital taxes are employed besides labor income taxes for two distinct reasons: i) c...

We build a heterogeneous life-cycle model which captures a large number of salient features of individual labor supply, by education, over the life cycle. The model provides an aggregation theory of individual labor supply, firmly grounded on micro evidence, and is used to study the aggregate labor supply responses to changes in the economic environment. We find that the aggregate labor supply ...