Job changes, hours changes and the path of labour supply adjustment

Richard Blundell (), Mike Brewer () and Marco Francesconi ()

No W05/21, IFS Working Papers from Institute for Fiscal Studies

Abstract: This paper uses the first twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey covering the period 1991-2002 to investigate single women's labour supply changes in response to three tax and benefit policy reforms that occurred in the 1990s. We find evidence of small labour supply effects for two of such reforms. A third reform in 1999 instead led to a significant increase in single mothers' hours of work. This increase was primarily driven by women who changed job, suggesting that labour supply adjustments within a job are harder than across jobs. The presence of hours inflexibility within jobs and labour supply adjustments through job mobility are strongly confirmed when we look at hours changes by stated labour supply preferences. Finally, we find little overall effect on wages.

Keywords: Job mobility; Hours flexibility; Labour supply preferences; Hours-wage trade-off; Monopsony (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 H31 I38 J12 J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-ltv and nep-pbe
Date: 2005-10
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifs.org.uk/wps/wp0521.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:05/21

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFS Working Papers from Institute for Fiscal Studies
Address: The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE
Series data maintained by Emma Hyman ().