Intertemporal Labor Supply Effects of Tax Reforms

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in post-war German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. One central aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. In this paper, I estimate an intertemporal discrete choice model of female labor supply that allows to analyze the behavioral effects of the tax reform on the labor supply of married and cohabiting women over time. Using the Markov chain property, I analyze the dynamics of labor supply behavior and derive the short- and long-run labor supply effects of the tax reform.Intertemporal labor supply of married women, tax reform, Panel data, microsimulation

Slowly, but Changing: How Does Genuine State Dependence Affect Female Labor Supply on the Extensive and Intensive Margin

In this paper I develop an intertemporal discrete choice model of female labor supply that allows to analyze state dependence and labor supply along the extensive and the intensive margin. Drawing on microsimulation the nonlinearities in the household budget set are captured and thus work incentives of both spouses can be accurately described. Unobserved heterogeneity is modeled nonparametrically and the initial conditions problem is explicitly accounted for. The estimation results show that state dependence is significantly positive at the extensive margin, yet modest on the intensive margin. Using the Markov chain property, I analyze the dynamics of labor supply behavior. I find that labor supply elasticities on both margins differ significantly between the short and long run.Genuine state dependence, labor supply of married women, panel data, unobserved heterogeneity, microsimulation

State Dependence and Female Labor Supply in Germany: The Extensive and the Intensive Margin

In this paper I develop an intertemporal discrete choice model of labor supply. The framework incorporates the nonlinearities in the household budget set and accounts for state dependence in labor supply. Based on panel data for Germany (SOEP), I estimate this model using a dynamic conditional logit panel data model with random effects. The estimation results show that state dependence is significantly positive at the extensive margin, yet modest or non existing on the intensive margin. Using the Markov chain property, I derive short and long term labor supply elasticities on both the intensive and extensive margin. The labor supply elasticities differ significantly between the short and long run.State dependence; Labor supply of married women; Panel data; Unobserved heterogeneity

Multi-Family Households in a Labour Supply Model: A Calibration Method with Application to Poland

The collective model of labour supply opened the household “black box” and allowed for individual treatment of partners in couples. However, the literature on labour supply has so far largely ignored a broader issue with special relevance to transition and developing countries – the distinction of single versus multi-family (“complex”) households. We propose a method to account for multi-family household structure by borrowing from recent applications of the collective model and combining estimation and calibration to identify the degree of resource sharing. We assume that each household is characterised by a between-family sharing parameter, which is calibrated on estimated preferences, the observed labour market status and other characteristics. The key identifying assumption is that preferences over income and leisure of specific family types living in single and multi-family households are the same conditional on observable characteristics. We apply the method to Polish labour market data.labour supply, within-household sharing, work incentives, transition

Can Child Care Policy Encourage Employment and Fertility?: Evidence from a Structural Model

In this paper we develop a structural model of female employment and fertility which accounts for intertemporal feedback effects between the two outcomes. We identify the effect of financial incentives on the employment and fertility decision by exploiting variation in the tax and transfer system which differs by employment state and number of children. To this end we simulate in detail the effects of the tax and transfer system including child care costs. The model provides estimates of structural preferences of women which can be used to study the effect of various policy reforms. In particular, we show that increasing child care subsidies conditional on employment increases labor supply of all women as well as fertility of the childless and highly educated women.Employment, fertility, financial incentives

The Design of Unemployment Transfers: Evidence from a Dynamic Structural Life-Cycle Model

In this paper we use a dynamic structural life-cycle model to analyze the employment, fiscal and welfare effects induced by unemployment insurance. The model features a detailed specification of the tax and transfer system, including unemployment insurance benefits which depend on an individual's employment and earnings history. The model also captures the endogenous accumulation of experience which impacts on future wages, job arrivals and job separations. For better identification of the structural parameters we exploit a quasi-natural experiment, namely reductions over time in the entitlement period for unemployment insurance benefits which varied by age and experience. The results show that a policy cut in the generosity of unemployment insurance operationalized as a reduction in the entitlement period generates a larger increase in employment and yields a bigger fiscal saving than a cut operationalized as a reduction in the replacement ratio. Welfare analysis of revenue neutral tax and transfer reforms also favors a reduction in the entitlement period.Unemployment insurance, Replacement ratio, Entitlement period, Life-cycle labor supply, Tax reform, Method of Simulated Moments

Optimal Income Taxation of Married Couples: An Empirical Analysis of Joint and Individual Taxation

In this paper we develop a discrete model of optimal taxation of married couples and empirically discuss the optimality of income taxation for this group. To this end, we derive the social welfare function which guarantees that joint taxation of married couples is optimal. We will contrast this welfare function with the one that makes a system of individual taxation optimal. For the empirical application we use a static structural labor supply model to estimate the preferences of households. We find that the system of joint taxation is only optimal when the government has a high taste for redistribution towards one-earner couples and a very low or even negative taste for redistribution towards couples in which both partners earn a similar amount of income. In contrast, the optimality of individual taxation is less dependent of the working composition within the household.Optimal taxation of married couples, joint taxation, labor supply estimation

Longevity, Life-Cycle Behavior and Pension Reform

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking individuals depend, inter alia, on life expectancy and the design of the public pension system. We calculate that, in the case of Germany, the fiscal consequences of the 6.4 year increase in age 65 life expectancy anticipated to occur over the 40 years that separate the 1942 and 1982 birth cohorts can be offset by either an increase of 4.34 years in the full pensionable age or a cut of 37.7% in the per-year value of public pension benefits. Of these two distinct policy approaches to coping with the fiscal consequences of improving longevity, increasing the full pensionable age generates the largest responses in labor supply and retirement behavior.Life expectancy, public pension reform, retirement, employment, life-cycle models, consumption, tax and transfer system

A Structural Approach to Estimating the Effect of Taxation on the Labor Market Dynamics of Older Workers

We estimate a dynamic structural life-cycle model of employment, non-employment and retirement that includes endogenous accumulation of human capital and intertemporal non- separabilities in preferences. Additionally, the model accounts for the effect of the tax and transfer system on work incentives. The structural parameter estimates are used to evaluate the effects of a tax reform targeted at low income individuals on employment behavior and retirement decisions.Life-cycle labor supply, income taxation

Empirical welfare analysis in random utility models of labour supply

The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the analysis. They also make the ethical priors, implicit in any interpersonal comparison, more explicit. On the basis of microdata from the Socio Economic Panel (SOEP) for married couples in Germany, we provide empirical evidence about the sensitivity of the welfare orderings to different normative principles embodied in these measures. We retrieve individual and household specific preference heterogeneity, by estimating a structural discrete choice labor supply model. We use this preference information to construct welfare orderings of households according to the different metrics, each embodying different ethical choices concerning the preference heterogeneity in the consumption-leisure space. We then discuss how sensitive the assessment of a hypothetical tax reform is to the choice of metric. The chosen tax reform is similar to a subsidy of social security contributions.