Costs of Low Productivity: Intensive and Extensive Margins

The Role of Extensive and Intensive Margins and Export Growth

We investigate and compare countries’ export growth based on their performance at the extensive and intensive export margins. Our empirical approach is motivated by an extension to the Melitz (2003) model of heterogeneous firms in which exporters are subject to a one-time sunk cost and also a per-period fixed cost. With imperfect information a firm may enter export markets but shortly exit when...

Aggregating Elasticities: Intensive and Extensive Margins of Female Labour Supply

We estimate labour supply elasticities at the micro level and show what we can learn from possibly very heterogeneous elasticities for aggregate behaviour. We consider both intertemporal and intratemporal choices, and identify intensive and extensive responses in a consistent life cycle framework, using US CEX data. There is substantial heterogeneity in how individuals respond to wage changes a...

Fertility Transitions Along the Extensive and Intensive Margins

By augmenting the standard quantity-quality model with an extensive margin, we generate sharp testable predictions of causes of fertility transitions. We test the model on two generations of Southern black women affected by a large-scale school construction program. Consistent with our model, women facing improved schooling opportunities for their children became more likely to have at least on...

Estimating Labor Supply at the Extensive and Intensive Margins

How wages and non labor income affect the decisions to work and hours of work are critical for understanding the work disincentive effects of taxes and transfers, and the attendant design of optimal income tax and transfer schemes. I use data from the Current Population Survey and variation induced by fundamental reforms to the U.S. tax and welfare systems in recent decades to estimate the labo...

Product Variety: The Intensive vs. Extensive Margins of Efficiency