This paper explains the narrowing of gender gaps in wages and market hours in recent decades by the growth of the service economy. We propose a model with three sectors: goods, services and home production. Women have a comparative advantage in the production of services in the market and at...

We study how employed and self-employed workers living as a couple differ in terms of allocation of their time. In particular, we focus on the division of domestic work between men and women. It emerges that the type of job strongly affects the allocation of time of men, whereas it is much less...

This paper explores the effects of husbands' commuting time on their wives' labour market participation and on family time allocation. We develop a unitary family model of labour supply, which includes commuting times and household production. In a pure leisure model longer commuting time for...

We estimate a structural life-cycle model of fertility and female labour supply and use it to evaluate the effects of a number of key family policy measures based on data for Germany. Parental leave benefits, child benefits and subsidized childcare are found to have substantial fertility...

The effects of childbirth on future labor market outcomes are a key issue for policy discussion. This paper implements a dynamic treatment approach to estimate the effect of having the first child now versus later on future employment for the case of Germany, a country with a long maternity...

This paper examines whether risk-taking in a lottery depends on the opportunity to respond to the lottery outcome through additional labor effort and/or tax evasion. Previous empirical attempts to answer this question face identification issues due to self selection into jobs that facilitate tax...

Based on a structural model of fertility and female labour force supply with unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence, we evaluate the 2007 reform of parental leave benefits in Germany, which replaced a flat, means-tested benefit by a generous earnings-related transfer. The model predicts a...

Previous reviews of static labor supply estimations concentrate mainly on the evidence from the 1980s and 1990s, Anglo-Saxon countries and early generations of labor supply modeling. This paper provides a fresh characterization of steady-state labor supply elasticities for Western Europe and the...

We study long-run trends in market hours of work and employment shifts across economic sectors driven by uneven TFP growth in market and home production. We focus on the structural transformation between agriculture, manufacturing and services and on the marketization of home production. The...

This paper presents evidence on gender segregation in employment contracts in 15 EUcountries, using micro data from the ECHPS. Women are over-represented in part-time jobsin all countries considered, but while in northern Europe such allocation roughly reflectswomen¿s preferences and their need...