Household Job Search: From the 1980s to the 2000s (and beyond)
(2024)
Files
Mankart_et_al_20241011.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 805.29 KB
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- We investigate the impact of structural changes that occurred in the US labour market since the 1980s for the labour supply/job search behavior of married couples, exploring a rich Bewley-Aiyagari model with dual earner households, on-the-job-search and endogenous entry into the labour force. We fit our model to a large set of moments on the labour market of married individuals, including employment/participation rates, wage distributions and estimates of the added worker effect which captures the sensitivity of married women’s reservation wages to their spouse’s employment status. We derive three main findings: i) Female labour supply behavior has changed considerably over time and female preferences over participation (employment and unemployment) became more aligned with male preferences. ii) Despite the shifts in labor supply behavior, most of the increase in female employment can be attributed to demand-side factors, such as changes in the gender wage gap and labor market frictions. iii) The trend in the added worker effect was not driven by ’income maximization’, whereby household members alternate employment to climb the wage ladder. Instead, the structural transformation of the US labour market has resulted in a higher insurance value of female labour supply, making households more likely to focus on the extensive margin. We discuss the relevance of these findings for recent strands of the quantitative macroeconomics literature.
- Affiliations
Citations
Mankart, J., Oikonomou, R., & Pascucci, F. (2024). Household Job Search: From the 1980s to the 2000s (and beyond). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/235337