This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of...

This paper investigates labour supply of married women in Mexico City. A static neoclassical structural mode is used. We assume that each woman chooses her labour supply and corresponding income so that her utility is maximized, conditional upon her husband ’s labour supply and earnings. We...

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...

We study the impact of income taxation on both partners' allocation of time to market work and unpaid house work in households with two adults. We estimate a structural household utility model in which the marginal utilities of leisure and house work of both partners are modelled as random...

The assumption that household income is strongly and positively correlated with a household's real standard of living provides the basis for the joint taxation of families, which has the effect of discriminating against married women as second earners. This paper shows, in the context of a model...

The UK’s Equal Opportunities Commission has recently drawn attention to the ‘hidden brain drain’ when women working part-time are employed in occupations below those for which they are qualified. These inferences were based on self-reporting. We give an objective and quantitative analysis...

Two particular features of the position of women in the British labour market are the extensive role of part-time work and the large part-time pay penalty. Part-time work features most prominently when women are in their 30s, the peak childcare years and, particularly for more educated women, a...

This paper studies the labour force participation dynamics of older couples in the United States. Longitudinal data from the five available waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is used to investigate if the dynamics introduced by considering both spouses’ behavior provide additional...

In this paper, I suggest an empirical framework for the analysis of mothers' labor supply and child care choices, explicitly taking into account access restrictions to subsidized child care. This is particularly important for countries such as Germany, where subsidized child care is rationed and...