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I am an applied microeconomist with a focus on labor and family economics. My dissertation addresses questions such as how individuals share resources inside their household or how they make joint decisions on their consumption or allocation of time. In my job market paper I investigate how wages and the gender wage gap affect the joint allocation of married people’s time across work in the labor market, work in the household, and leisure. I develop a dynamic collective household model without commitment to lifetime marriage and I estimate it on PSID data after 1980.
- Labour
- Family Economics
- Consumption
- Applied Micro-econometrics
"Wages and Family Time Allocation"
Abstract
This paper examines how married people's time allocation responds to wages and the gender wage gap. In the US, real wages have grown steadily for married men, but even more for married women, narrowing the gender wage gap by as much as 25% over the last three decades. At the same time, women's labor supply has increased and, while couples spend less time on household work, men's relative burden has increased. I develop a collective life-cycle model for individuals in a household (spouses) who differ in preferences and bargaining power but share a common budget constraint; the model features lack of commitment. Individuals decide collectively about market work, household work, and leisure. Individual wages and the gender wage gap affect the family budget as well as intra-family bargaining power. I estimate gender-specific preferences and the parameters of intra-family bargaining power using data on married and divorced individuals from the PSID. The results suggest that the narrowing gender wage gap improved women's bargaining power in the family resulting in a shift of household work from women to men. The effect of women's improved bargaining power on their market work was small. If the gender wage gap was eliminated altogether, female full-time market work would increase by more than 32% even during the childbearing years; moreover total time into household work would decrease by as much as 21% with the time allocation between spouses becoming relatively more equal.
- Prof Ian Preston (University College London)
- Prof Sir Richard Blundell (University College London)
- Prof Eric French (University College London)
- Dr Valerie Lechene (University College London)
