A Structural Model of the Labor Market to Understand Gender Gaps among Marginalized Roma Communities

Mauricio Salazar-Saenz and Monica Robayo-Abril

No 9398, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper constructs and estimates a household-level search model to analyze Roma spouses'utility maximization for leisure, home production, and work. The paper aims to explain labor market gender gaps in amarginalized Roma population with low labor market participation rates (males 53 percent and females 17percent). The analysis uses data from the 2017 Regional Roma Survey for six Western Balkan countries. The simulationresults show that the main source for gender differentials in the labor market is the unequal opportunities in favor ofmales -- not gender preferences or differences in home production productivity. Therefore, most of the genderdifferences in the labor market can be closed by providing wives the same labor market conditions as husbands.Counterfactual policy experiments show that policies that increase the frequency of receiving a job offer, decreasethe frequency of laying off workers, and reduce search increase Roma husbands' labor participation. Policiesthat equalize wages induces more wives to join the labor market and husbands to withdraw from it. This outcomesignals that the wage gap is the dimension that deters the greatest number of Roma wives from joining the labor market.

Keywords: Rural Labor Markets; Gender and Development; Employment and Unemployment; Inequality; Labor Markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-upt
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