Marriage stability, taxation and aggregate labor supply in the US vs. Europe

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chakraborty, Indraneel; Holter, Hans A.; Stepanchuk, Serhiy
• 署名单位: Southern Methodist University; University of Miami; University of Oslo; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF MONETARY ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3932
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jmoneco.2015.01.001
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 1-20
• 关键词: Aggregate labor supply; taxation; marriage; divorce; heterogeneous households

摘要

Americans work more than Europeans. Using micro-data from the United States and 17 European countries, we document that women are typically the largest contributors to the cross-country differences in work hours. We also show that there is a negative relation between taxes and annual hours worked, driven by men, and a positive relation between divorce rates and annual hours worked, driven by women. In a calibrated life-cycle model with heterogeneous agents, marriage and divorce, we find that the divorce and tax mechanisms together can explain 45% of the variation in labor supply between the United States and the European countries. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.