This paper examines the effect of the 1993 Earned Income Tax Credit expansion on the labor force participation of single women by comparing the changes from before to after the expansion in the participation of women with no, one, and two or more children. Both quasi−experimental and regression−based difference−in−difference estimates from annual 1991−1998 March CPS data indicate that this expa...

We study optimal taxation in an environment where the agents di er in their work opportunity costs. The opportunity cost of work is xed, independent of the number of hours worked: the only decision of the agents is to (full time) participate, or not, in the labor force. The planner, who does not observe the opportunity costs, is utilitarian. We nd a large class of planner objectives where it is...

This paper documents a little-noticed feature of US labor markets—very large variation in the labor supply of married women across cities. We focus on cross-city differences in commuting times as a potential explanation for this variation. We start with a model in which commuting times introduce non-convexities into the budget set. Empirical evidence is consistent with the model’s predictions: ...

Previous research on male subjects has conjectured that subjective selfreports of health status may lead to an upward bias in the estimated effect of health on labor force participation because subjects who are out of the labor force may be more likely to understate their health status so as to justify their lack of employment. In the descriptive analysis conducted in this article, we compare t...