Labor Supply Responses Research Articles

Estimating labor supply responses to Danish tax reforms

This paper estimates the elasticity of labor supply at the intensive margin by applying the latest estimation strategies from the elasticity of taxable income literature to administrative register data on performed hours of work. Performed hours of work are contract hours plus paid overtime, minus paid absence, vacation, and holiday leave. I estimate elasticities of labor supply at the intensive margin (ELS), labor income (ELI), and taxable income (ETI) of 0.08, 0.06, and 0.1. The results show that the high ratio of ELI to ETI can be attributed to changes in labor supply for wage earners, capturing inherent labor responses. As a result, I explicitly connect the labor supply and ETI literatures. The labor supply response is driven by changes in contract hours, paid absence, and individuals switching between main and secondary employment. These results suggest that contextual factors such as labor market fluidity and flexibility are important to facilitate real responses to taxation and that labor supply responses are core underlying drivers of total responses to taxation.

Air pollution and gender imbalance in labor supply responses: Evidence from South Korea

Air pollution and gender imbalance in labor supply responses: Evidence from South Korea

Hypothetical Tax-Benefit Reforms in Hungary: Shifting from Tax Relief to Cash Transfers for Family Support

ABSTRACT This paper evaluates two hypothetical budget-neutral reforms that shift resources from family tax expenditures to family cash transfers. We evaluate these reforms using a structural labor supply model based on the microsimulation EUROMOD model and EU-SILC data. We find that both reforms have an inequality-decreasing impact. However, when looking at labor supply responses for different household types, we show that the reforms have a non-negligible impact, especially for females in couple households. Additionally, we show that females in the middle of the income distribution in particular reduce labor supply in response to the reforms.

Labour Supply Responses to Income Tax Changes in Spain

This paper simulates the response of the Spanish labour supply to income tax changes using estimates for the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of leisure, calculated using a pseudo-panel built combining information from the EPA and the ECPF, for the period 1987-1997. According to our findings, income tax reforms have an impact on Spanish labour market, although the effects are quite small, making this mechanism a restricted tool for addressing the country’s existing social security system deficit. Further, labour responses differ for men and women, across workers’ age, as well as between permanent and fixed-term contract workers.

Income Guarantee Policy Design: Implications for Poverty, Income Distribution, and Tax Rates

A guaranteed income could greatly reduce poverty, yet the impact and feasibility depend on several key policy design choices. We empirically compare guarantee designs financed by income taxation and estimate potential labor supply responses to transfer benefits as well as financing or targeting mechanisms. The analysis features a fundamental tax reform converting personal deductions and credits into an income guarantee along with higher marginal tax rates. Additional results consider policies with a flat surtax, benefit phaseout, or welfare reform. We use microsimulation analysis based on the Current Population Survey, and we adjust for underreported income.

Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Expanded Child Tax Credit

We estimate the extensive and intensive margin labor supply response to the monthly Child Tax Credit disbursed in 2021 as a part of the American Rescue Plan Act. Using Current Population Survey microdata, we compare labor supply outcomes among households who qualify for varying relative increases in household income as a result of their income level and household size. We do not find strong evidence of a change in labor supply for families receiving the credit. The results are robust to alternative labor supply models, where households respond mainly to cash on hand or changes in the annual budget set.

The relative income effect and labor supply

In the presence of relative income concerns, labor supply response is predicted to be smaller for individual wage change than for global wage change. This difference arises from the relative income effect, which in the case of global wage change is offset by changes in income distribution. We relate the predicted difference in labor supply response to the controversy about differences in micro and macro labor supply elasticities. The relative income effect can also account for a variety of empirical patterns of labor supply elasticity that could not be previously addressed within a single framework.

Labor markets: A critical link between global-local shocks and their impact on agriculture

Labor markets can shape the impacts of global market developments and local sustainability policies on agricultural outcomes, including changes in production and land use. Yet local labor market outcomes, including agricultural employment, migration and wages, are often overlooked in integrated assessment models (IAMs). The relevance of labor markets has become more important in recent decades, with evidence of diminished labor mobility in the United States (US) and other developed countries. We use the SIMPLE-G (Simplified International Model of agricultural Prices, Land use, and the Environment) modeling framework to investigate the impacts of a global commodity price shock and a local sustainable groundwater use policy in the US. SIMPLE-G is a multi-scale framework designed to allow for integration of economic and biophysical determinants of sustainability, using fine-scale geospatial data and parameters. We use this framework to compare the impacts of the two sets of shocks under two contrasting assumptions: perfect mobility of agricultural labor, as generally implicit in global IAMs, and relatively inelastic labor mobility (‘sticky’ agricultural labor supply response). We supplement the numerical simulations with analytical results from a stylized two-input model to provide further insights into the impacts of local and global shocks on agricultural labor, crop production and resource use. Findings illustrate the key role that labor mobility plays in shaping both local and global agricultural and environmental outcomes. In the perfect labor mobility scenario, the impact of a commodity price boom on crop production, employment and land-use is overestimated compared with the restricted labor mobility case. In the case of the groundwater sustainability policy, the perfect labor mobility scenario overestimates the reduction in crop production and employment in directly targeted grids as well as spillover effects that increase employment in other grids. For both shocks, impacts on agricultural wages are completely overlooked if we ignore rigidities in agricultural labor markets.

Caring to Work or Working to Care

We seek to understand how the labor market decisions of the family adjust in response to plausibly exogenous health shocks. Family members might work less to provide caregiving, or work more in response to medical expenditures and loss of income by the ill individual. We use records of emergency department (ED) visits and hospitalizations to empirically determine the size of these effects. Using ED events, we find evidence of intra-family insurance. By exploring how insurance varies by the severity of the health shock, we find that family labor supply responses decrease as the caregiving need increases.

Tax‐and‐transfer progressivity and business cycles

This paper studies how tax‐and‐transfer progressivity influences aggregate fluctuations when interacting with household heterogeneity. Using a simple static model of the extensive margin labor supply, we analytically characterize how a degree of progressivity influences differential labor supply responses to aggregate conditions across heterogeneous households. We then build a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with both idiosyncratic and aggregate productivity shocks and show that it delivers moderately procyclical average labor productivity and a large cyclical volatility of aggregate hours relative to output. Our quantitative exercises suggest that progressivity at the bottom of the income distribution shaped by the phasing out of transfers is key for these findings. Finally, we provide suggestive empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of employment responses across the wage distribution.

The Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Expanded Child Tax Credit

The Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Expanded Child Tax Credit

Forward-Looking Labor Supply Responses to Changes in Pension Wealth: Evidence from Germany

Forward-Looking Labor Supply Responses to Changes in Pension Wealth: Evidence from Germany

Tax-and-Transfer Progressivity and Business Cycles

This paper studies how transfer progressivity influences aggregate fluctuations when interacted with household heterogeneity. Using a simple static model of the extensive margin labor supply, we analytically characterize how transfer progressivity influences differential labor supply responses to aggregate conditions across heterogeneous households. We then build a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with both idiosyncratic and aggregate productivity shocks and show that the model delivers moderately procyclical average labor productivity and a large cyclical volatility of aggregate hours relative to output. Counterfactual exercises indicate that redistributive policies have very different implications for business cycle fluctuations, depending on whether tax progressivity or transfer progressivity is used. Finally, we provide empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of employment responses across the wage distribution, which supports the key mechanism of our model.

Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Timing of Transfer Payments: Evidence from the Snap Program

Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Timing of Transfer Payments: Evidence from the Snap Program

The Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Expanded Child Tax Credit

The Short-Term Labor Supply Response to the Expanded Child Tax Credit

Forward-Looking Labor Supply Responses to Changes in Pension Wealth: Evidence from Germany

Forward-Looking Labor Supply Responses to Changes in Pension Wealth: Evidence from Germany

“Since You’re So Rich, You Must Be Really Smart”: Talent, Rent Sharing, and the Finance Wage Premium

Abstract Financial sector wages have increased extraordinarily over the last decades. We address two potential explanations for this increase: (1) rising demand for talent and (2) firms sharing rents with their employees. Matching administrative data of Swedish workers, which include unique measures of individual talent, with financial information on their employers, we find no evidence that talent in finance improved, neither on average nor at the top. The increase in relative finance wages is present across talent and education levels, which together can explain at most 20% of it. In contrast, rising financial sector profits that are shared with employees account for up to half of the relative wage increase. The limited labour supply response may partly be explained by the importance of early-career entry and social connections in finance. Our findings alleviate concerns about “brain drain” into finance but suggest that finance workers have captured rising rents over time.

Asymmetric labor-supply responses to wage changes: Experimental evidence from an online labor market

We test whether labor supply responds symmetrically to wage increases and decreases using a randomized real effort online experiment. The results show that wage increases have smaller effects on labor supply than wage decreases of equal magnitude, especially on the extensive margin where the response to a wage decrease is twice that to a wage increase. This finding suggests that labor-supply responses to wage changes are asymmetric. We discuss the potential mechanisms behind our results including standard models of labor supply, reference dependence in consumption and reciprocity.

Universal Cash Transfers and Labor Market Outcomes

AbstractOne major criticism of Universal Basic Income is that unconditional cash transfers discourage recipients from working. Evidence to date has largely relied on targeted and/or conditional transfer programs. However, it is difficult to draw conclusions from such programs because universal transfers may induce a positive demand shock by distributing cash to a large portion of the population, which may in turn offset any negative labor supply responses. We estimate the causal effects of universal cash transfers on short‐run labor market activity by exploiting the timing and variation in size of a long‐running unconditional and universal transfer: Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend. We find evidence of both a positive labor demand and negative labor supply response to the transfers. Small negative effects on the number of hours worked are found for women, especially those with young children. In contrast, we find an increase in the probability of employment for males in the months following the distribution. Altogether, a $1,000 increase in the per‐person disbursement leads to a 0.8 percent labor market contraction on an annual basis.

Postpartum Job Loss: Transitory Effect on Mothers, Long-run Damage to Children

The first year after childbirth involves dramatic changes to parents’ lives and is crucial for children's development. Using plausibly exogenous job loss from mass layoffs and establishment closures, we provide novel evidence on the effect of adverse shocks in the first postpartum year on mothers and children. Our results reveal that effects of adverse labor shocks among females are significantly larger in the first postpartum year. No such differential effects are present among males. Additionally, we find long-lasting harm to children's educational outcomes 15 years after the displacement event took place. The child effects are not present among those who experience paternal labor shocks. To better understand these results, we investigate several potential mechanisms, including income, mobility, spousal labor supply responses, fertility, and marital dissolution.