Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/82588 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2012:10
Publisher: 
Uppsala University, Department of Economics, Uppsala
Abstract: 
Americans work more than Europeans. Using micro data from the U.S. and 17 European countries, we study the contributions from demographic subgroups to these aggregate level differences. We document that women are typically the largest contributors to the discrepancy in work hours. We also document a negative empirical correlation between hours worked and different measures of taxation, driven by men, and a positive correlation between hours worked and divorce rates, driven by women. Motivated by these observations, we develop a life-cycle model with heterogeneous agents, marriage and divorce and use it to study the impact of two mechanisms on labor supply: (i) differences in marriage stability and (ii) differences in tax systems. We calibrate the model to U.S. data and study how labor supply in the U.S. changes as we introduce European tax systems, and as we replace the U.S. divorce and marriage rates with their European equivalents. We find that the divorce and tax mechanisms combined explain 58% of the variation in labor supply between the U.S. and the European countries in our sample.
Subjects: 
Aggregate Labor Supply
Taxation
Marriage
Divorce
Heterogeneous Households
JEL: 
E24
E62
H24
H31
J21
J22
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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