Home Production and Gender Gap in Structural Change

Huoqing Cao, Chaoran Chen and Xican Xi

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We document that the gender gap in non-agricultural work in developing countries exists primarily among rural married workers, not singles. Rural married women dedicate a much larger portion of time to home production compared to other groups, making them less likely to pursue non-agricultural employment. We extend a general equilibrium Roy model to incorporate the joint labor supply decisions of rural married couples, accounting for gender-specific labor distortions and entry barriers to non-agriculture. Calibrating the model to China, we find that within-household specialization among married couples greatly amplifies the effects of gender-specific labor distortions, and that changes in entry barriers to non-agriculture widened the gender gap in China between 2000 and 2010. Enhancing public services such as childcare facilities can effectively induce more married women to work in non-agriculture. Extrapolating our model globally, it explains a quarter of the variation in the gender gap across countries.

Keywords: structural transformation; gender gap; home production; within-family specialization; occupational choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E13 J11 J16 J22 J24 O11 O13 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-10-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-lma
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https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/122334/1/MPRA_paper_122334.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/122890/9/MPRA_paper_122890.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/123638/1/MPRA_paper_123638.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

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