Taxation and Labor Supply of Married Couples across Countries: A Macroeconomic Analysis

We document contemporaneous differences in the aggregate labor supply of married couples across 18 OECD countries. Relative to their US counterparts, European married men work on average 9 to 17 percent, and married women in Western and Southern Europe 26 and 31 percent fewer hours. Married women in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe however work almost as many hours as US married women. We find that a model of joint household decision-making can largely replicate these facts if the full non-linearity of labor income taxes and the tax treatment of married couples are taken into account. Going to a system of strictly separate taxation would increase labor supply of married women by more than 100 hours annually in a third of our sample countries.