The pattern of joining the labor force only at an advanced stage of the life-cycle was widespread among American women in the 1960s and 1970s, but not since the 1980s. To explain this change we conduct a theoretical analysis of the interrelation between women's lifetime labor supply choices and...

Despite considerable changes in the gender gap regarding educational qualifications and labor force participation, the share of female managers has changed only slowly and continues to be low. This paper adds new evidence to the study of the dearth of women in top managerial positions in firms...

Using a promotion signaling model in which wages are realistically shaped by market forces, we analyze how male overconfidence combined with competitive workplace incentives affects gender equality in the labor market. Our main result is that overconfident workers exert more effort to be...

Gender differences in overconfidence have been extensively documented in the empirical literature, but the implications for labor market outcomes are not well understood. In this paper, we analyze how men's relatively higher overconfidence, combined with competitive job incentives, affects...

We propose a unified economic model of sexual exchanges that treats both unpaid and paid sex as outcomes of individual time allocation decisions. Departing from existing literature that separates sex into marital relations or specialized markets, the model incorporates relational skills, gender...

We develop a rational choice model of sexual exchange that unifies marriage and paid sex, explaining two key facts: the gendered segregation of sex markets and the decline in sexual activity and fertility. Individuals choose whether to engage in paid or unpaid sex based on income, human capital,...

This paper considers a simple model of self-fulfilling expectations that leads to a multiple equilibrium of gender gaps in wages and participation rates. Rather than resorting to moral hazard problems related to unobservable effort, like in most of the related literature, our model fully relies...

In a careful and thorough empirical study, Christopher Udry (1996) shows convincingly that, in a large sample of West African households, household resource allocations were not Pareto efficient. This paper argues that observation of the Pareto inefficiency of a household resource allocation...

This paper presents the properties of optimal piecewise linear income tax systems for families based on joint and individual incomes respectively. It models the interaction between the wage rates of mothers as "second earners" and variation in child care prices and productivities as determinants...

We develop an equilibrium lifecycle model of education, marriage and labor supply and consumption in a transferable utility context. Individuals start by choosing their investments in education anticipating returns in the marriage market and the labor market. They then match based on the...