Structural change in labor supply and cross-country differences in hours worked

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bick, Alexander; Fuchs-Schuendeln, Nicola; Lagakos, David; Tsujiyama, Hitoshi
• 署名单位: Arizona State University; Arizona State University-Tempe; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); Goethe University Frankfurt; Boston University; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF MONETARY ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3932
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jmoneco.2022.05.007
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 68-85
• 关键词: Hours worked; Employment rates; labor supply; structural change

摘要

This paper studies how structural change in labor supply along the development spectrum shapes cross-country differences in hours worked. We emphasize two main forces: sec-toral reallocation from self-employment to wage work, and declining fixed costs of wage work. We show that these forces are crucial for understanding how the extensive margin (the employment rate) and intensive margin (hours per worker) of aggregate hours worked vary with income per capita. To do so we build and estimate a quantitative model of la-bor supply featuring a traditional self-employment sector and a modern wage-employment sector. When estimated to match cross-country data, the model predicts that sectoral re-allocation explains more than half of the total hours decrease at lower levels of develop-ment. Declining fixed costs drive the rise in employment rates at higher levels of income per capita, and imply higher hours in the future, in contrast to the lower hours resulting from income effects and expansions in tax-and-transfer systems.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.