Gender Gap in Spain: Policies and Outcomes
over the Last Three Decades, with Ezgi Kaya and Virginia Sanchez-Marcos, September 2012
We document recent
trends in gender equality in employment and wages in Spain. Despite an impressive
decline in gender gap in employment, females are still less
likely to work, and if they work
they are more likely to be employed part time and with temporary contracts. The gender gap (after controlling for worker and job characteristics) is about 20% and did not change between
1995 and 2006. Furthermore, the
gender gap in wages is driven mainly by
differences in returns to
individual characteristic. While
women are more qualified than men in observable labor market characteristics, they end up earning
less. Public policy seems to affect female employment.
In particular, there was a
significant acceleration of female
employment in 2000s. This was a period in which many policies that were implemented
after early 1990s started to have their longer term
effects. It was also a period
during which Spain received a large number of immigrants, which had a positive impact on female labor force participation.
Income Taxation
of U.S. Households: Facts and Parametric Estimates, with Remzi Kaygusuz and Gustavo
Ventura, August 2012.
We use micro data from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to
document how Federal Income tax liabilities vary with income, marital status
and the number of dependents. We report facts on the distributions of average
taxes, properties of the joint distributions of taxes paid and income, and
discuss how taxes are affected by marital status and the number of children. We
also provide multiple parametric estimates of tax functions for use in applied
work in macroeconomics and public finance.
Technology
and the Changing Family, Jeremy
Greenwood, Georgi Kocharkov
and Cezar Santos, June 2012.
Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger
for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has
increased, more so for the non-college educated vis-ŕ-vis the college educated.
Additionally, assortative mating has risen; i.e.,
people are more likely to marry someone of the same educational level today
than in the past. A unified model of marriage, divorce, educational attainment
and married female labor-force participation is developed and estimated to fit
the postwar U.S. data. The role of technological progress in the household
sector and shifts in the wage structure for explaining these facts is gauged.
Firm Dynamics,
Job Turnover, and Wage Distributions in an Open Economy, with Kerem
Cosar and James Tybout, May
2011.
This paper explores the effects of tariffs, trade costs, and firing costs
on firm dynamics and labor markets outcomes. The analysis is based on a general
equilibrium model with labor market search frictions, wage bargaining, firing
costs, firm-specific productivity shocks, and endogenous entry/exit decisions.
Firing costs reduce firms’ profits and discourage them from quickly adjusting
their employment levels in response to idiosyncratic shocks. Tariffs and other
trade costs reduce rents for efficient firms and increase rents for inefficient
firms, as in Melitz (2003). These well-known effects
interact with idiosyncratic productivity shocks and with scale economies in
hiring costs to determine the equilibrium size distribution of firms,
entry/exit rates, job turnover rates, rate of informality, and cross-firm wage
distributions.
Marital
Instability and the Distribution of Wealth, with John
Knowles, manuscript, July 2007.
The levels of wealth differ significantly among people who are approaching
their retirement both by current marital status as well as by marital
histories. We develop an equilibrium model of marriage and divorce and
household savings, in which the interplay between endogenous formation and
dissolution of families and savings decisions plays a key role. We show that a
calibrated version of the model can reproduce observed patterns of wealth
inequality by marital status and marital history, and highlight the role of
endogenous marriage formation in wealth accumulation.
An Economic Analysis of Family Structure: Inheritance Rules
and Marriage Systems, manuscript (first version November 1998). Updated version coming soon.
Traditional societies had norms governing the choice of mates and rules for
determining inheritances. The goal here is to analyze how different inheritance
rules and marriage systems are determined. To do this, an overlapping
generations model of an agrarian economy is constructed. On the one hand, a
young adult’s prospects on the marriage market depend upon the inheritance he
or she will receive from their parents. The size of the inheritance is a
function of who the children marry. On the other hand, parents depend upon
their children to support them in old age. In the analysis, the size of
inheritance and the level of old age support are determined as a result of a
multilateral bargaining process between parents and their children. Assortative mating, patrilineal
inheritance rules and polygamy emerge naturally out of the model.