Tied Wage-Hours Offers and the Endogeneity of Wages

In the standard model of labor supply, each worker is a price taker,where the relevant price is an hourly wage rate which is fixed in the short run, and which does not depend upon the number of hours supplied. With this basic assumption, the wage can be regarded as exogenous for the purpose of estimating a labor supply function. This paper proposes and implements a pair of tests for the exogeneity of wages in a longitudinal labor supply model, and for the particular failure of exogeneity associated with jobs that offer wage-hour packages.The first test is very simple -- it amounts to a test of whether hours Granger -- cause wages at the individual level. The second test involves a simultaneous estimation of labor supply and wage offer equations. Both tests indicate that the offered wage is related to hours worked, though the offer locus is, for this sample, very flat. The principal conclusion is that labor supply equations cannot properly be estimated in isolation from the process generating wages, even when long time series are available on a sample of individuals.

Efficiency in Marriage

Economists usually assume that bargaining in marriage leads to efficient outcomes. The most convincing rationale for this assumption is the belief that efficient allocations are likely to emerge from repeated interactions in stationary environments, and that marriage provides such an environment. This paper argues that when a current decision affects future bargaining power, inefficient outcomes are plausible. If the spouses could make binding commitments -- in effect, commitments to refrain from exploiting the future bargaining advantage -- then the inefficiency would disappear. But spouses seldom can make binding commitments regarding allocation within marriage. To investigate the efficiency of bargaining within marriage when choices affect future bargaining power, we consider the location decisions of two-earner couples. These location decisions are transparent and analytically tractable examples of choices likely to affect future bargaining power, but the logic of our analysis applies to many other decisions. For example, decisions about education, fertility, and labor force participation are also potential sources of inefficiency.

Saving for Retirement: Household Bargaining and Household Net Worth

Traditional economic models treat the household as a single individual, and do not allow for separate preferences of and possible conflicts of interest between husbands and wives. Since wives are typically younger than their husbands and life expectancy for women exceeds that for men, wives may prefer to save more for retirement than do their husbands. This suggests that households in which wives have greater relative bargaining power may accumulate greater net worth as they approach retirement. Most empirical models of net worth in the literature do not include characteristics of both spouses. We present a more complete unitary model of household net worth and find, among couples in the first wave of the Health and Retirement Survey, that the characteristics of both husband and wife are determinants of net worth. We explore the importance of bargaining in marriages of older couples by examining the empirical relationship between their net worth and factors such as relative control over current income sources, relative age, and relative education. We find some evidence that low relative education of wives is associated with low net worth.

Hours Restrictions and Labor Supply

This study presents a model of labor supply in which individuals may face constraints on their choice of work hours, and analyzes the sensitivity of parameter estimates and policy conclusions to the usual assumption of unrestricted choice. We set up the labor supply decision asa discrete choice problem, where each worker faces a finite number of employment opportunities, each offering fixed hours of work.The distribution from which these are drawn, as well as the number of draws, is estimated along with the behavioral parameters of individual labor supply.The standard model with unconstrained hours appears as a special case where the number of draws approaches infinity. We estimate the mean absolute difference between desired and actual work hours to be about ten hours perweek. The results strongly support the notion that hours choices are constrained, and suggest that models which ignore restrictions on hours worked may yield biased estimates of the wage elasticity of desired hours. Further, we suggest that analysis of policies such as income transfers and the flat rate tax which do not consider their effects on the distribution of hours offered may be very misleading.