Gendered Change: 150 Years Transformation in US Hours (with Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo). October 2026. CEPR DP 22111
Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Gendered Impact of Land Reform (with Ting Chen, Jiajia Gu and Jin Wang). August 2026, CFM-DP2026-19.
Matching People to Properties: A Matching Function for the Housing Market (with Felix Iglhaut, Kevin Sheedy, Fei Wu and Shuang Zhang), August 2026.
Gendered Change: 150 Years Transformation in US Hours (with Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo). October 2026. CEPR DP 22111
Previous version: NBER Working Paper 32475.
Abstract: We construct consistent estimates of market hours for 1880-2020, including unpaid farm labor, by gender, sector, and margin of labor supply. For 1880-1930, we assemble and harmonize data from roughly one hundred historical sources, extending Census and ACS hours data available from 1940 onward. Women's hours follow a U-shape, men's decline monotonically, and aggregate hours decline before modestly rebounding. We develop a multisector model in which subsistence consumption and uneven productivity growth generate structural transformation and marketization. Initially, structural transformation dominates, reducing market hours while increasing home production and leisure. As agriculture shrinks, marketization gains importance, raising market hours. Gender specialization shapes the relative strength of these forces. Together, they account for all of women's decline in market hours before 1950 and one-fifth of their subsequent rise, as well as 80 percent of men's pre-1950 decline and one-quarter of their subsequent decline.
Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Gendered Impact of Land Reform (with Ting Chen, Jiajia Gu and Jin Wang). August 2026, CFM-DP2026-19.
Previous version: STEG WP 119, CEPR Discussion Paper 20360, IZA DP 18569
Abstract: We study how land rights insecurity slows women's transition out of agriculture more than men's by keeping women on the farm as guard labor. Exploiting two major Chinese land reforms, we construct a county-level reform index using large-language-model textual analysis of policy documents. Combining this index with a large panel dataset, we provide causal evidence that strengthening land rights shifts rural women out of agriculture significantly more than men. We then develop a multi-sector model incorporating couples' labor allocation, featuring reform and non-reform rural regions, and calibrate key elasticity parameters to match the predicted cross-regional differences with our empirical estimates. This allows us to quantify the contribution of land reform operating through the guard labor mechanism. The effects are gendered and quantitatively important: land reform accounts for 31% of rural women's transition out of agriculture, compared to 11% for men.
Taxes, Subsidies and Gender Gaps in Hours and Wages (with Robert Duval-Hernandez and Lei Fang), Economica 100 Series, 2023, 90: 373-408.
Online Appendix -- Proofs and calibration procedures
Keywords: Home production, gender gaps, taxes and subsidies.
Time Use and Gender in Africa in Times of Structural Transformation(with Taryn Dinkelman), Journal of Economic Perspective Winter 2022, 36(1): 57-80.
VoxEU Column, Video interview by CEPR VoxEU.
Keywords: Home production, female time allocation, time use surveys in Africa, structural transformation.
Home Production, Women's Market Work and Structural Transformation (Taryn Dinkelman), April 2021. Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG) Pathfinding Paper.
Keywords: Female time allocation, home production, structural transformation.
Gender Gaps and the Rise of the Service Economy (with Barbara Petrongolo). American Economic Journal -- Macroeconomics, October 2017, 9(4): 1-44. (note)
2018 AEJ: Macroeconomics Best Paper Award
A nice video on the main idea of the paper produced by the American Economic Association.
Previous title "Structural Transformation, Marketization and Female Employment". CEP DP1204. CEPR DP 9970.
Keywords: gender gaps, structural transformation, home production, rise in female market hours, fall in male market hours, rise in gender wage ratio
Gendered Change: 150 Years Transformation in US Hours (with Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo). October 2026. CEPR DP 22111
Previous version: NBER Working Paper 32475.
Abstract: We construct consistent estimates of market hours for 1880-2020, including unpaid farm labor, by gender, sector, and margin of labor supply. For 1880-1930, we assemble and harmonize data from roughly one hundred historical sources, extending Census and ACS hours data available from 1940 onward. Women's hours follow a U-shape, men's decline monotonically, and aggregate hours decline before modestly rebounding. We develop a multisector model in which subsistence consumption and uneven productivity growth generate structural transformation and marketization. Initially, structural transformation dominates, reducing market hours while increasing home production and leisure. As agriculture shrinks, marketization gains importance, raising market hours. Gender specialization shapes the relative strength of these forces. Together, they account for all of women's decline in market hours before 1950 and one-fifth of their subsequent rise, as well as 80 percent of men's pre-1950 decline and one-quarter of their subsequent decline.
Taxes, Subsidies and Gender Gaps in Hours and Wages (with Robert Duval-Hernandez and Lei Fang), Economica 100 Series, 2023, 90: 373-408.
Online Appendix -- Proofs and calibration procedures
Keywords: Home production, gender gaps, taxes and subsidies.
Time Use and Gender in Africa in Times of Structural Transformation(with Taryn Dinkelman), Journal of Economic Perspective Winter 2022, 36(1): 57-80.
VoxEU Column, Video interview by CEPR VoxEU.
Keywords: Home production, female time allocation, time use surveys in Africa, structural transformation.
Rising inequality and trends in leisure (with Timo Boppart). Journal of Economic Growth June 2021, 26(2): 153-185.
Keywords: Trends in leisure, inequality, balance growth path.
Home Production, Women's Market Work and Structural Transformation (Taryn Dinkelman), April 2021. Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG) Pathfinding Paper.
Keywords: Female time allocation, home production, structural transformation.
Gender Gaps and the Rise of the Service Economy (with Barbara Petrongolo). American Economic Journal -- Macroeconomics, October 2017, 9(4): 1-44. (note)
2018 AEJ: Macroeconomics Best Paper Award
A nice video on the main idea of the paper produced by the American Economic Association.
Previous title "Structural Transformation, Marketization and Female Employment". CEP DP1204. CEPR DP 9970.
Keywords: gender gaps, structural transformation, home production, rise in female market hours, fall in male market hours
Taxes, Social Subsidies and the Allocation of Work Time (with Chris Pissarides), American Economic Journal - Macroeconomics, October 2011, 3(4): 1-26.
Previous title: "Welfare Policy and the Sectoral Distribution of hours of Work".
Keywords: time allocation, home production, welfare policy (taxes and subsidies), 19 OECD countries
Trends in Hours and Economic Growth (with Chris Pissarides), Review of Economic Dynamics, April 2008, Volume 11, p. 239-256.
Previous Title: "Trends in Labour Supply and Economic Growth"
Keywords: structural transformation, marketization, home production, trends in aggregate market hours, aggregate balanced growth path.
Matching People to Properties: A Matching Function for the Housing Market (with Felix Iglhaut, Kevin Sheedy, Fei Wu and Shuang Zhang), August 2026.
Previous version: CEPR DP 21392.
Abstract: Housing markets are subject to search frictions. The matching function is a widely used tool in macroeconomics to summarize labour-market search frictions and has been estimated in an extensive literature. Limited data on home-buyers has precluded estimation of housing-market matching functions. This paper fills that gap using a novel dataset identifying buyers and their search behaviour in viewing properties. An event study based on the staggered removal of restrictions on housing purchases provides the first causal estimation of the elasticity of matches with respect to buyers for a constant-returns-to-scale Cobb-Douglas matching function, which is found to be around 0.54.
To Own or to Rent? The Effects of Transaction Taxes on Housing Markets (with Lu Han and Kevin Sheedy), Review of Economic Studies July 2026, 93(4): 2605-2645.
Abstract: Using sales and leasing data, this paper finds three novel effects of a higher property transaction tax: higher buy-to-rent transactions alongside lower buy-to-own transactions, despite both being taxed; lower sales-to-leases and price-to-rent ratios; and longer time-on-the-market. This paper explains these facts by developing a search model with entry of investors and households choosing to own or rent in the presence of credit frictions. A higher transaction tax reduces homeowners’ mobility and increases the demand for rental properties, which reduces the homeownership rate. The deadweight loss from the tax is large at 113% of revenue, with more than half of this due to distorting decisions to own or rent.
Housing and Inequality (with Yannis Ioannides), Journal of Economic Literature September 2025, 63(3): 916-963.
Abstract: We approach the literature on housing and inequality from two angles. One is the impact of unequal endowments on housing. The second is the “memberships” inequality associated with neighborhoods, namely, households’ location in a geographic and social context. We elaborate on these two angles of inequality and focus on three distinctive features of housing: consumption, capital and location. For owner-occupants, capital and consumption are bundled together in a single good. For both renters and owner-occupants, housing consumption inequality, access to good neighborhoods, and housing wealth follow from unequal endowments. Housing can propagate inequality by enabling owner-occupants to use it as collateral for other investments, or secure higher returns to human capital investments through the better schools in better neighborhoods. We use this approach to analyse key aspects of housing and inequality, paying special attention to the impacts of racial discrimination and segregation.
Ins and Outs of Selling Houses: Understanding Housing-Market Volatility (with Kevin Sheedy), International Economic Review, 2024, 65(3): 1415-1440.
Abstract: This paper documents the role of inflows (new listings) and outflows (sales) in explaining the volatility and co-movement of housing-market variables. An ‘ins versus outs’ decomposition shows that both flows are quantitatively important for housing-market volatility. The correlations between sales, prices, new listings, and time-to-sell are stable over time, while the signs of their correlations with houses-for-sale are found to be time varying. A calibrated search-and-matching model with endogenous inflows and outflows and shocks to housing demand matches many of the stable correlations and predicts that the correlations with houses-for-sale depend on the source and persistence of shocks.
The decision to move house and aggregate housing-market dynamics (with Kevin Sheedy). Journal of the European Economic Association, October 2020, 18(5): 2487-2531.
Keywords: housing market, search and matching, endogenous moving, match quality investment, mismatch
Hot and Cold Seasons in the Housing Market (with Silvana Tenreyro). (Web Appendix), American Economic Review, December 2014, 104(12): 3991-4026.
Keywords: seasonality, the U.K. and the U.S. housing markets, match-specific quality, thick-market effect.
Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Gendered Impact of Land Reform (with Ting Chen, Jiajia Gu and Jin Wang). August 2026, CFM-DP2026-19.
Previous version: STEG WP 119, CEPR Discussion Paper 20360, IZA DP 18569
Abstract: We study how land rights insecurity slows women's transition out of agriculture more than men's by keeping women on the farm as guard labor. Exploiting two major Chinese land reforms, we construct a county-level reform index using large-language-model textual analysis of policy documents. Combining this index with a large panel dataset, we provide causal evidence that strengthening land rights shifts rural women out of agriculture significantly more than men. We then develop a multi-sector model incorporating couples' labor allocation, featuring reform and non-reform rural regions, and calibrate key elasticity parameters to match the predicted cross-regional differences with our empirical estimates. This allows us to quantify the contribution of land reform operating through the guard labor mechanism. The effects are gendered and quantitatively important: land reform accounts for 31% of rural women's transition out of agriculture, compared to 11% for men.
A Multisector Perspective on Wage Stagnation (with Orhun Sevinc), Review of Economic Dynamics, 2025, April.
Vox Talks, video on the main idea of the paper produced by the LSE Research.
Abstract: Low-skill workers are concentrated in sectors experiencing fast productivity growth, yet their real wages have stagnated and lagged behind aggregate productivity. We provide evidence demonstrating the importance of a multisector perspective. Central to our mechanism is the decline in the relative price of the low-skill intensive sector driven by its faster productivity growth. This dampens wage gains for low-skill workers by lowering the price of their output relative to their consumption basket, which is further rein
forced by shifting them into the sector where less weight is placed on their labor. We calibrate the two-sector model to the 1980–2010 U.S. economy and find this mechanism to be quantitatively important. Our counterfactual analysis reveals that low-skill real wage growth would have nearly doubled if the observed aggregate productivity growth had been evenly distributed across sectors.
Taxes, Subsidies and Gender Gaps in Hours and Wages (with Robert Duval-Hernandez and Lei Fang), Economica 100 Series, 2023, 90: 373-408.
Online Appendix -- Proofs and calibration procedures
Keywords: Home production, gender gaps, taxes and subsidies.
China's mobility barriers and employment allocations (with Chris Pissarides and Jin Wang). Journal of the European Economic Association, Oct 2019, 17(5): 1617-53. Republished in JEEA Editor's Choice Collection.
Keywords: Mobility barriers, China's Hukou system, land policy, location-based social subsidies, structural transformation, urbanization
Taxes, Social Subsidies and the Allocation of Work Time (with Chris Pissarides), American Economic Journal - Macroeconomics, October 2011, 3(4): 1-26.
Previous title: "Welfare Policy and the Sectoral Distribution of hours of Work".
Keywords: time allocation, home production, welfare policy (taxes and subsidies), 19 OECD countries
Multisector Models, International Encyclopedia of The Social Sciences, April 2008, 333-335.
Employment outcomes in the welfare state (with Chris Pissarides), Revue economique 2008, 59(3) p413-436.
Keywords: marketization, home production, social subsidies and taxes.
Public Enterprises and Labour Market Performance (with Johannes Hörner and Claudia Olivetti), International Economic Review, May 2007, Volume 48, No. 2, p. 363-384.
Keywords: Unemployment, public sector employment, economic turbulence
Barriers and the Transition to Modern Growth, Journal of Monetary Economics, October 2004, Volume 51, Issue 7, p. 1353-1383.
Keywords: cross-country income differences, stagnation to growth, transitional dynamics.
A Multisector Perspective on Wage Stagnation (with Orhun Sevinc), Review of Economic Dynamics, 2025, April.
Vox Talks, video on the main idea of the paper produced by the LSE Research.
Abstract: Low-skill workers are concentrated in sectors experiencing fast productivity growth, yet their real wages have stagnated and lagged behind aggregate productivity. We provide evidence demonstrating the importance of a multisector perspective. Central to our mechanism is the decline in the relative price of the low-skill intensive sector driven by its faster productivity growth. This dampens wage gains for low-skill workers by lowering the price of their output relative to their consumption basket, which is further rein
forced by shifting them into the sector where less weight is placed on their labor. We calibrate the two-sector model to the 1980–2010 U.S. economy and find this mechanism to be quantitatively important. Our counterfactual analysis reveals that low-skill real wage growth would have nearly doubled if the observed aggregate productivity growth had been evenly distributed across sectors.
Rising inequality and trends in leisure (with Timo Boppart). Journal of Economic Growth June 2021, 26(2): 153-185.
Keywords: Trends in leisure, inequality, balance growth path.
Accounting for Research and Productivity Growth Across Industries (with Roberto Samaniego), Review of Economic Dynamics, July 2011, Volume 14, p. 475-495.
Keywords: cross-industry productivity growth, endogenous growth model, R&D.
Mapping Prices into Productivity in Multisector Growth Models (with Roberto Samaniego), Journal of Economic Growth, September 2009, Volume 14, p.183-204.
Keywords: input-output table, intermediate goods, investment-specific technical change (ISTC).
Trends in Hours and Economic Growth (with Chris Pissarides), Review of Economic Dynamics, April 2008, Volume 11, p. 239-256.
Previous Title: "Trends in Labour Supply and Economic Growth"
Keywords: structural transformation, marketization, home production, trends in aggregate market hours, aggregate balanced growth path.
Structural Change in a Multisector Model of Growth (with Chris Pissarides), American Economic Review, March 2007, Volume 97, No. 1, p.429-443.
A longer working paper version: CEPR DP 4763. Previous title: "Balanced Growth with Structural Change".
Keywords: multi-sector growth model, structural change (Kuznets' facts), aggregate balanced growth path (Kaldor's facts)
Barriers and the Transition to Modern Growth, Journal of Monetary Economics, October 2004, Volume 51, Issue 7, p. 1353-1383.
Keywords: cross-country income differences, stagnation to growth, transitional dynamics.