ABSTRACT

Fluctuations in house prices generate substantial heterogeneity in the price of purchase of similar dwellings depending on the time of purchase. These differences in the price of purchase have large effects on income-net-of-housing-costs. We document these effects using the large house price fluctuations during the recent housing boom-bust in Spain. Households can mitigate these impacts through changing labour supply. Men work more subsequent to paying higher house prices at purchase , whereas the correlation of house prices and labour supply for women is driven by selection: households where women work more, buy more expensive houses.

ABSTRACT

Some high-income countries have total fertility rates as low as one child. Using Spanish administrative data, we document that temporary contracts correlate with lower first birth rates. Also, women with children are less likely to work split-shift jobs with long breaks in the middle of the day. We build a life-cycle model where women decide on labor supply and fertility. We show that reforms eliminating duality or split-shift jobs raise women’s labor participation, narrow the employment gap between mothers and nonmothers, and boost fertility for working women. These reforms, together with childcare subsidies, increase married women’s fertility to 1.8 children.

ABSTRACT

Using microdata from the CPS and the HRS, we document changes in labor force participation at older ages in the USA since the mid-1990s. Our main finding is that the over two-decade increase in participation is solely driven by individuals in good health, and does not differ across either educational or occupational groups. This phenomenon may importantly affect the results of social security reforms aiming at raising the mandatory retirement age and may exacerbate the health gap in lifetime earnings.

ABSTRACT

We use the Flexible Professional in the Knowledge Society data set to learn about gender gaps during the early career of college graduates in Europe. We document substantial heterogeneity across fields of education in the gender wage gap at the entrance to the labour market. We find that the gap evolves against women over the five years after graduation in Social Science and in Economics, Business, and Law. Finally, we estimate a significant female wage growth penalty after we control for observable characteristics only within the Economics, Business, and Law category. Within this field, we estimate a female annual wage growth penalty of 1.1 percentage points among individuals who remained childless and 2.5 percentage points among individuals who became parents. A small fraction of the wage growth gap disappears after we control for variables capturing individual differences in job mobility or in labour market attachment during the early career. 

ABSTRACT

In this paper we propose a novel approach that relates age-specific cohort fertility rates with socioeconomic conditions faced by each cohort in each single age to understand the behaviour of fertility. We implement this approach to study the evolution of fertility over the last 40 years in Spain, where both fertility and socioeconomic situations have undergone substantial changes during the period under scrutiny. We find female education and labour market conditions to be highly correlated with the evolution of cohort age-specific fertility rates in Spain. 

ABSTRACT

We show that there is substantial heterogeneity in women’s labor supply elasticities at the micro level and highlight the implications for aggregate behavior. We consider both intertemporal and intratemporal choices, and identify intensive and extensive responses in a consistent life-cycle framework, using US CEX data. Heterogeneity is due to observables, such as age, wealth, hours worked, and the wage level, as well as to unobservable tastes for leisure: the median Marshallian elasticity for hours worked is 0.18, with corresponding Hicksian elasticity of 0.54 and Frisch elasticity of 0.87. At the 90th percentile, these values are 0.79, 1.16, and 1.92. Responses at the extensive margin explain about 54% of the total labor supply response for women under 30, although this declines with age. Aggregate elasticities are higher in recessions, and increase with the length of the recession. The heterogeneity at the micro level means that the aggregate labor supply elasticity is not a structural parameter: any aggregate elasticity will  epend  n the demographic structure of the economy as well as the distribution of  ealth and the particular point in the business cycle.

ABSTRACT

The quality of education appears to be negatively correlated with both the overeducation of workers at the tasks they perform and the unemployment rate across EU-15 countries, and positively correlated with the wage premium associated to tertiary education. We develop a model of the labor market with frictions to quantitatively investigate the impact of the education outcomes on the labor market. We show that both the ability of educated and non educated workers have sizable effects on the incentives of firms regarding the type of vacancies they open and also regarding the incentives of educated workers as of where to search for a job. Therefore education outcomes are relevant to understand the overeducation phenomena observed in the labor market. According to our quantitative analysis had the quality of education observed in Spain been similar to the European average then the overeducation rate would have been between 5 and 10 percentage points lower and the unemployment rate of the two types of workers would be reduced by 40%, but the tertiary education wage premium would be slightly smaller than in the benchmark economy. 

ABSTRACT

Spousal and survivor pensions are two important provisions of the US Social Security pension system. In this paper, we assess the impact of these benefits on the female employment rate in the context of a full life-cycle model in which households decide on female labor supply and savings. One important aspect of our model is that we allow for returns to labor market experience so that participation decisions affect not only current earnings and Social Security pension eligibility but also future earnings. We quantify the effect on female labor supply and on household inequality of (i) removing spousal benefit, (ii) removing both spousal and survivor pension benefits, and (iii) extending from 35 to 40 the number of periods of the working career that are considered when calculating the retired worker’s pension. We find that reforms (i) and (ii) significantly increase female employment throughout the life cycle, whereas reform (iii) has a very mild effect. The effect of (ii) on income inequality in older household is large, whereas the effect on consumption inequality is small. All three reforms have substantial effects on Social Security expenditure and fiscal revenues.

ABSTRACT

In this paper we document the behavior of emancipation over one of the biggest boombust cycles experienced by the Spanish economy. In principle, the economic difficulties faced by the Spanish youth during the last recession would have hampered normal emancipation pace. However, we find that the proportion living away from parents among those aged 18–40 has not decreased but increased from 44 % during the boom (2005–2008) to 46 % during the bust (2009–2013). A simple decomposition reveals that this is mainly driven by the substantial rise in the emancipation rate among the full-time employed workers during the bust. To explain this change we discuss several factors such as macroeconomic conditions, rental subsidy policy, higher labor mobility, selection bias, reverse causation, time-lag in adjustment and secular trend.

ABSTRACT

This paper shows how family policies aimed at reconciling the pressures of family and work generate substantial variation in labour market outcomes across developed countries. We use a life-cycle model of female labour supply and savings behaviour, calibrated to the US economy, to assess the effect of introducing to the US a maternity leave policy similar to Scandinavian-type policies. We focus on the impact on gender differences in participation and in wages. We distinguish between the effect of the job protection offered by maternity leave and the effect of income replacement. Job protection leads to substantial increases in participation of mothers with children under 6, but with little long term effects. The effects on wages are minimal, with negative selection effects offsetting the reduced human capital depreciation. Income replacement has a limited impact on participation or wages.

We document recent trends in gender equality in employment and wages in Spain. Despite an impressive decline in the gender gap in employment, females are still less likely to work than males: about 76% of working age males and 63% of working age females were employed in 2010. If females work they are more likely to be employed part time and with temporary contracts. The large increase in female employment, from 28% in 1977 to 63% in 2010, was accompanied by a significant decline in fertility. The gender gap in wages, after controlling for worker and job characteristics as well as for selection, is high. It was about 20% in 2010, quite close to its value in 1994. Furthermore, the gender gap in wages is driven mainly by differences in returns to individual characteristics. While women are more qualified than men in observable labor market characteristics, they end up earning less. There have been several important policy changes that try to help families reconcile responsibilities with market work. The existing literature suggests that households do react to incentives generated by different policies and policy changes are at least partly responsible for changes in female labor supply. In recent decades, the large inflow of immigrants, who provided relatively cheap household services, allowed more educated women to enter the labor market. Policy challenges, however, remain.

Recent pension reforms in Spain have been guided by two opposite goals: achieving financial stability and improving redistributive aspirations. In particular, reforms implemented in 1997/2001 entailed a mixture of both through: (i) changes in the pension formula; (ii) the extension of entitlement to early retirement to all cohorts; and (iii) increases in survival pensions. This paper builds an applied general equilibrium OLG model that captures the fundamental non-stationarity of the Spanish reality (ageing population, education transition and increasing female attachment to the labour market) to assess the impact of those reforms. As a novel feature with respect to the literature, households in our model economy are made up of two potential earners who make saving and labour supply decisions. Our main conclusions from the analysis are at three different levels. First, the Spanish pension system is clearly unsustainable, with pension expenditure reaching a figure of about 18 per cent of GDP in 2050, and the reforms have clearly been ineffective in improving the pension system’s financial prospects. Second, the reforms have had substantial redistribution effects, benefiting low-educated groups compared with high-educated groups and future cohorts compared with current cohorts. Finally, we show that exploring the financial prospects with traditional single-earner household models may result in underestimates of the future financial burden of the pension system.

ABSTRACT

In this article we characterize the evolution of inequality in hourly wages, hours of work, labor earnings, household disposable income and household consumption for Spain between 1985 and 2000. We look at both the Encuesta Continua de Presupuestos Familiares and the European Household Community Panel. Our analysis shows that inequality in individual net labor earnings and household net disposable income has decreased substantially. The decreases in the tertiary education premium and in the unemployment rate have been key ingredients to understand this falling trend. Public transfers have played a crucial role in smoothing out the inequality arising in the labor market, but instead the Spanish family does not seem to have been an important insurance mechanism. Regarding household consumption, inequality has fallen much less than inequality in household net disposable income, with the decrease mostly concentrated in the second half of the eighties. This suggests that the reduction in income inequality has affected the sources of permanent differences between households only during the second half of the eighties. Our estimates of the earnings process for the period are consistent with this view.

The aim of this paper is to measure the potential effect of a family policy introduced in Spain in 2003 that provides working mothers with a monthly cash benefit of 100 euros per child aged under 3 years. We explore the effect of the policy on eligible women's labour market participation. In the tradition of the policy evaluation literature we use a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) estimation approach. Our results support a small but significant positive effect of the policy. We find that since the implementation of the policy the labour market participation rate for mothers of children aged under 3 has risen by 3 percentage points compared to the rate for non-policy-eligible females. This represents 5% of their average labour market participation in 2002, the year before the policy was implemented. This overall policy effect is dominated by the effect of the policy among high school educated females.

This paper studies the life-cycle labor supply of three cohorts of American women, born in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. We focus on the increase in labor supply of mothers between the 1940s and 1950s cohorts. We construct a life-cycle model of female participation and savings, and calibrate the model to match the behavior of the middle cohort. We investigate which changes in the determinants of labor supply account for the increases in participation early in the life-cycle observed for the youngest cohort. A combination of a reduction in the cost of children alongside a reduction in the wage-gender gap is needed.

ABSTRACT

We build an aggregate model with different size houses and liquid assets. Typical households are born, are subject to idiosyncratic earnings risk, and save for both life-cycle reasons and housing reasons. Typically, a subset of these households, after accumulating some assets, make a down payment and buy a small starter's house or flat. As time passes, some households upgrade to a larger and nicer house. Households with houses may also eventually downgrade to a flat or even to no house and flat owners may sell. Our specification attempts to replicate some important features of modern aggregate economies: The distribution of earnings and of housing and non housing wealth as well as some macroeconomic aggregates, including features of the mortgage issuing sector.

ABSTRACT

The objective of this article is to explain the reduction in the US sex college attainment ratio (SCAR) from 1.57 to 1.19. over the last decades. We use a model where altruistic parents make decisions on daughters and sons' education taking into account the effect of education on earnings, marriage opportunities, fertility and home production. The main finding is that observed changes in earnings and fertility explain part of the decrease in the SCAR, while observed changes in marital status and marital sorting imply a decrease in college attainment of women.

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the welfare implications of a PAYG pension system in an overlapping generations (OLG) model with demographic uncertainty and incomplete markets. In the absence of public pensions, small cohorts tend to be favoured by the changes in relative prices implied by demographic shocks. PAYG defined-benefit systems can help to share the financial risks created by this type of demographic uncertainty across generations. Our careful quantitative analysis test this possibility with unfavourable results: the overall welfare impact of the public pensions is negative, due to the prominence of the crowding-out effect over the insurance effect.

In this paper, we explore the role of female labor supply as an insurance mechanism against idiosyncratic earnings risk within the family. We use a life-cycle model in which a unitary family makes consumption, saving, and labor supply decisions. Additional uncertainty increases female participation rates. This effect on participation is greatest when the ability to borrow (and hence to smooth consumption) is limited. We calculate the welfare cost of increases in uncertainty and show that the welfare cost is greater when households are unable to adjust female labor supply.

ABSTRACT

Up to the late 1970's the Sex College Attainment Ratio (SCAR), or ratio of college attainment between men and women, was about 1.6. Assortative mating within education groups in marriages is strong enough in the United States to prevent accounting for the SCAR feature based on males' higher earnings. We document the puzzling nature of the SCAR, and we explore various theories to account for it. Our main finding is that if parents' well-being is affected by the number of grandchildren, gender differences in the steepness of the negative relation between educational attainment and number of children provides the best theory to understand the SCAR.