We study the causal effects of changes in parental leave provisions on fertility and return-towork behavior. We exploit a policy change that took place in 1990 in Austria which extended the maximum duration of parental leave from the child’s first to the child’s second birthday. As parental...

Das heutige System der sozialen Mindestsicherung verhindert in Deutschland die Ausbildung eines Niedriglohnsektors. Dies ist eine wesentliche Ursache für die hohe Arbeitslosigkeit Geringqualifizierter. Dieser Beitrag stellt zwei häufig genannte Maßnahmen zur Überwindung sozialstaatlicher...

This paper investigates the consequences of a series of Swedish policy changes beginning in 1989 where different regions started subsidizing the birth control pill. The reforms were significant and applied to all types of oral contraceptives. My identification strategy takes advantage of the...

This paper attempts to reconcile the high apparent aggregate elasticity of labor supply with small micro estimates. We elaborate on Rogerson’s seminal work (1988) and show that his results rely neither on complete markets nor on lotteries, but rather on the indivisibility of labor supply and...

The tax simulation studies in Japan have necessarily relied on arbitrary sets of preference parameters due to the paucity of the empirical estimates. Motivated by this state of the art, we estimate the labor supply function and preference parameters for Japanese prime-age males, allowing for the...

We propose a new VAR identification scheme that distinguishes shifts of and movements along the labor demand schedule to identify labor-supply shocks. According to our VAR analysis of post-war U.S. data, labor-supply shifts account for about 30 percent of the variation in hours and about 15...

Studying the incentives and constraints in the non-market sector — that is, home production — enhances our understanding of economic behavior in the market. In particular, it helps us to understand (1) small variations of labor supply over the life cycle, (2) large variations of employment...

Before the mid-1960's economists generally accepted, with two major exceptions, the neoclassical theory of aggregate labor supply, i.e., the theory that the number or workers supplied to the market varied with wages, population, and work preferences, with work preferences and population treated...