This paper explains the narrowing of gender gaps in wages and market hours in recent decades by the growth of the service economy. We propose a model with three sectors: goods, services and home production. Women have a comparative advantage in the production of services in the market and at home. The growth of the services sector, in turn driven by structural transformation and marketization o...

Labour Force Participation of the Elderly in Europe: The Importance of Being Healthy In this paper we study labour force participation behaviour of individuals aged 50-64 in 11 European countries. The data are drawn from the new Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The empirical analysis shows that health is multidimensional, in the sense that different health indicators h...

This paper formulates and estimates a dynamic discrete choice model of elder parent care and work to analyze how caregiving affects a woman’s current and future labor force participation and wages. I model caregiving and work decisions in an intertemporal framework which incorporates parental health changes, human capital accumulation, and job offer availability. The model is estimated on a sam...

The aim of this paper is to identify the sources of time use differences between married and cohabiting couples and to answer the question whether there is a “selection into specialization”, i.e. whether cohabiting partners who agree on a (traditional) division of work simply have a higher probability of getting married. In a non-parametric matching approach, we compare couples who get married ...

The influence of Streptococcus mitis BMS biosurfactants on the adhesion of eight pioneer and four cariogenic oral bacterial strains was, for a first screening, examined in a microtiter plate assay. The adhesion to pellicle-coated wells of three cariogenic strains was inhibited >70% by the biosurfactants, while only one pioneer strain showed >70% reduction. The reduction for the other strains di...

This paper addresses the implications of transitory changes in labor market conditions for low versus high educated workers on the decision to acquire education. To identify this effect, I use the improvement in labor market prospects of low educated workers motivated by the increases in construction employment and wages during the recent housing boom. The estimation strategy is based on the fa...

We evaluate the treatment e¤ect of disability grant program using matching methods. A variety of propensity score matching methods applied, show that, on average, the disability grant program has large and signi…cant e¤ects on lowering labour force participation rates of grant recipients. In particular the General Household Survey data we use show that labour force participation rates of Disabi...

This paper estimates the Frisch elasticity of labor supply, which represents the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. Estimation of this elasticity has previously required assuming that utility is either separable between consumption and leisure or quasi-homothetic with respect to leisure. These restrictions are required to generate hours equations in which individual effects, representing...

Data on the life-cycle profiles of inequality in wages, earnings, hours worked and consumption contains precious information for answering questions about the ability of households to insure labor market risk and about the sources of this risk. This paper demonstrates that the choice of whether to control for cohort effects or for time effects has a drastic impact on the estimated age profiles ...

Raising Juveniles This paper investigates how families make decisions about the education of juveniles. The decision problem is analyzed in three variations: a ‘decentralized’ scheme, in which the parents control the purse-strings, but the children dispose of their time as they see fit; a ‘hierarchical’ scheme, in which the parents can enforce a particular level of schooling by employing a moni...