Why are Married Men Working So Much? An Aggregate Analysis of Intra-Household Bargaining and Labour Supply

John Knowles

The Review of Economic Studies, 2013, vol. 80, issue 3, 1055-1085

Abstract: Are macro-economists mistaken in ignoring bargaining between spouses? This article argues that models of intra-household allocation could be useful for understanding aggregate labour supply trends in the U.S. since the 1970s. A simple calculation suggests that the standard model without bargaining predicts a 19% decline in married-male labour supply in response to the narrowing of the gender gap in wages since the 1970s. However married-men's paid labour remained stationary over the period from the mid 1970s to the recession of 2001. This article develops and calibrates to U.S. time-use survey data a model of marital bargaining in which time allocations are determined jointly with equilibrium marriage and divorce rates. The results suggest that bargaining effects raised married-men's labour supply by about 2.1 weekly hours over the period, and reduced that of married women by 2.7 hours. Bargaining therefore has a relatively small impact on aggregate labour supply, but is critical for trends in female labour supply. Also, the narrowing of the gender wage gap is found to account for a weekly 1.5 hour increase in aggregate labour supply. Copyright 2013, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (66)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rds043 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:restud:v:80:y:2013:i:3:p:1055-1085

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().