Indraneel Chakraborty, Hans A. Holter, S. Stepanchuk
{"title":"Marriage Stability, Taxation and Aggregate Labor Supply in the U.S. vs. Europe","authors":"Indraneel Chakraborty, Hans A. Holter, S. Stepanchuk","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.971281","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":369344,"journal":{"name":"American Finance Association Meetings (AFA)","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2015-01-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"29","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American Finance Association Meetings (AFA)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.971281","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 29
Abstract
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.