Optimal taxes for Europe and the U.S. are derived in a realistically calibrated model in which agents buy consumption goods and services and use home capital and labor to produce household services. The optimal tax rate on services is substantially lower than the tax rate on goods. Specifically,...

This paper presents the properties of optimal piecewise linear tax systems for two-earner households, based on joint and individual incomes respectively. A key contribution is the analysis of the interaction between second earner wage differences, variation in the price of child care and...

Does availability of common law marriage (CLM henceforth) in the U.S help explain variation in the labor force participation, hours of work and hours of household production of men and women over time and across states? As CLM offers more legal protection to household producers at the margin...

This paper surveys the last decade of micro-economic research using time-use data. Focusing on the household production model, time-use as an investment activity, and the distribution of extended income, issues of data collection, measurement errors, model specification and estimation as well as...

We analyse the effects of retirement of one partner on home production by both partners in a couple. Using longitudinal data from Germany on couples, we control for fixed household specific effects to address the concern that retirement decisions are correlated with unobserved characteristics...

We document the importance of non-pecuniary aspects in employment relationships by showing that labour supply elasticities differ significantly among individuals’ job characteristics. Factor analysis indicates the relevance of four characteristics: autonomy, workload, variety and job security....

There are several striking peculiarities of the arts labor market that have attracted the attentions of researchers in the last several decades: first is constant long run excess supply of arts labor; second, artists are more likely to be multiple-job-holders than other professions; third,...

This paper examines the role of home production in estimating life-cycle labor supply. I show that, consistent with previous studies, ignoring an individual's time spent on home production when estimating the Frisch elasticity of labor supply biases its estimate downwards. I also show, however,...

We study variations in housework time and leisure consumption when workers are subject to labor market work hours constraints that prevent them from working the optimal number of hours. Using data from two large nationwide longitudinal surveys, we first document that such constraints are...

We extend the search-matching model of the marriage market of Shimer and Smith (2000) to allow for labor supply, home production, match-specific shocks and endogenous divorce. We study nonparametric identification using panel data on marital status, education, family values, wages, and market...