Husband’s Unemployment and Wife’s Labor Supply: The Added Worker Effect across Europe

Julia Bredtmann, Sebastian Otten and Christian Rulff

ILR Review, 2018, vol. 71, issue 5, 1201-1231

Abstract: This article investigates the responsiveness of women’s labor supply to their husband’s job loss—the so-called added worker effect. The authors contribute to the literature by taking an explicit internationally comparative perspective in analyzing the variation of the added worker effect across welfare regimes. Using longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey covering 28 European countries from 2004 to 2013, they find evidence of an added worker effect, which, however, varies over both the business cycle and the different welfare regimes in Europe. The latter result might be explained, in part, by differences in the design of the unemployment benefit system across countries, which create different incentives for the labor supply of wives of unemployed men.

Keywords: added worker effect; labor supply; unemployment; cross-country analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (41)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ilr.sagepub.com/content/71/5/1201.abstract (text/html)

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:sae:ilrrev:v:71:y:2018:i:5:p:1201-1231

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().