Marriage and Work: an analysis for French couples in the last decade

This paper looks at French couples’ labour market behaviour over the last thirteen years, from 1990 to 2002. We find that the proportion of dual earners couples has been steadily rising over time. Joint activity rates have gone up from 52% in 1990 to over 58% in 2002. About a fifth of women in dual earners couples in our sample earns a higher gross monthly salary than their husbands. The proportion of male breadwinners couples has diminished steadily overtime, from 30% in 1990 to 22% in 2002; while that of female breadwinners has increased from 5% to 7%. We provide some descriptive and exploratory analysis of the determinants of the labour market states of spouses, accounting for class endogamy as well as for changing macroeconomic conditions. W e find that class endogamy is an important determinant of the labour market states occupied by spouses. Wives that earn more than their husbands are either low-educated women with a low-educated husband or high-educated women. Classification-JEL : D1, J12, J21 Keywords : Marriage, work behaviour, household economics.

Evaluating the impact of the French tax credit on the employment rate of women

This paper investigates the employment impact of a new tax-credit programme that was put in place in France in 2001. We study the introduction of both this measure and a later reform in 2004 that made the tax credit cashable in advance upon returning to work. We adopt a non-experimental evaluation method. The data for the analysis are drawn from the French Labour Force Surveys over the period 1999 to 2005. Due to the break in the French LFS series in 2003, we analyze separately the two periods 1999-2002 and 2003-05, as well as pooling the data over 1999-2005, under particular assumptions. We find evidence of a significantly negative employment effect for married women, with a reduction of about 3.2-3.4 percentage points in their employment rate after the introduction of the policy. The impact is positive and weakly significant for cohabiting women, while positive but statistically insignificant for lone mothers. We do not find any evidence of an additional effect of the tax credit due to the cashable advance credit reform of 2004.policy evaluation; difference-in-differences estimator; labour supply

Modelling the Employment and Wage Outcomes of Spouses: Is She Outearning Him?

This paper is focused on couple households where the wife is the main earner. The economic literature on this subject is particularly scant. According to our estimates, the wife was the main earner in one of every six couple households in France in 2002, including wife-sole-earner households. The proportion of wives outearning their husbands was 18% for dual-earners. About 24% of American women in dual-earner households earned more than their husband in 2004. Using a model of household labour supply behaviour, we show that households where the wife is the main earner may come about either because the husband has a weaker preference for work than his wife, due possibly to her high wage, or because he is hit by adverse circumstances, such as, for example, a decline in the demand for men with his particular qualifications. Positive assortative mating may also come into play. Our empirical model specifies spouse labour-market participation equations within each household, endogenizing wages and allowing for random effects and correlations in spouses’ unobservables. We conclude that the determinants of wife-sole-earner households are quite distinct from those for dual-earner households where she outearns him. The probability of observing the first seems to be more related to labour market difficulties of the husband, while the latter is not. Dual-earners where she outearns him are more likely to be found among higher educated couples, and especially, among couple where the wife’s education level is high.marriage, work behaviour, household economics

Does Income Taxation Affect Partners’ Household Chores?

We study the impact of income taxation on both partners‟ allocation of time to market work and unpaid house work in households with two adults. We estimate a structural household utility model in which the marginal utilities of leisure and house work of both partners are modelled as random coefficients, depending on observed and unobserved characteristics of the household and the two partners. We use a discrete choice model with choice sets of 2,401 points for each couple, distinguishing seven market work intervals and seven house work intervals for each partner. The model is estimated using data for France, which taxes incomes of married couples jointly, like, for instance, Germany and the US. We find that both partners‟ market and non-market time allocation decisions are responsive to changes in the tax system or other policy changes that change the financial incentives. Women‟s time allocation is more responsive to the own and the partner‟s wage rate than men‟s. Tax policy simulations suggest that moving from joint taxation for married couples to separate taxation of each spouse would go a small step in the direction of equalizing market and non-market work of spouses. Selective taxation with smaller tax rates for women than for men would magnify these effects.time use;taxation;labour supply;discrete choice models

Retirement and home production : A regression discontinuity approach

Existing studies show that individuals who retire replace some private consumption by home production, but do not consider joint behaviour of couples. Here we analyze the causal effect of retirement of each partner on hours of home production of both partners in a couple. Our identification strategy exploits the earliest age retirement laws in France, enabling a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach. We find that own retirement significantly increases own hours of home production and the effect is larger for men than for women. Moreover, retirement of the female partner significantly reduces male hours of home production but not vice versa.House work, Ageing,Retirement,Regression Discontinuity

Propagation and deposition of stony debris flows at channel confluences

The fluid dynamics of stony debris flows generated in two small tributaries adjacent to each other and flowing into a main receiving channel was analyzed experimentally at a laboratory scale. The analysis on the propagation along the tributaries and deposition in the main channel provide information about sediment-water mobility, dangerous damming, and potential hazard. Debris flows were generated by releasing a preset water discharge over an erodible layer of saturated gravels material. As a consequence, the debris flow sediment concentration varied accordingly to the entrainment rate which, in turn, was strongly controlled by the tributary slope. The data collected by acoustic level sensors, pore fluid pressure transducers, and a load cell were used to characterize the evolution of bulk density and solid concentration of the sediment-water mixture. These two parameters were relevant to assess the stony debris flow mobility which contributes to determine the shape of sediment deposits in the main channel. The detailed bed topography surveys carried out in the main channel at the end of each experiment provided information on the morphology of these deposits and on the interplay of adjacent confluences. The influences of conflu- ence angle, tributary slopes, and triggering conditions have been investigated, for a total of 18 different configurations. Within the investigated range of parameters, the slope angle was the parameter that mainly influences the stony debris flow mobility while, for adjacent confluences, the degree of obstruction within the receiving channel was strongly influenced by the triggering scenario

Do the rich stay unemployed longer? An empirical study for the U.K

This paper investigates the impact of individual asset holdings on the probability of leaving unemployment. According to the theory, higher levels of financial wealth will result in higher reservation wages and longer unemployment durations. I estimate the impact of beginning of period financial assets on the hazard rate, using data drawn from a UK inflow sample of the unemployed. The empirical findings indicate that individual asset holdings affect significantly the escape rate out of unemployment. In particular, negative levels of wealth increase significantly the hazard of leaving unemployment while positive levels of wealth reduce significantly the probability of leaving unemployment.unemployment;duration analysis;labour economics