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Every week, the Economics Group of King's Business School organises research seminars in economics. Bi-weekly research seminars in economics are organised by the Economics Group of King's Business School together with economists at the Department of Political Economy and Department of International Development.
This week we welcome Barbara Petrongolo (Queen Mary University London).
"Economic incentives, home production and gender identity norms"
Abstract:
We study the role of gender identity norms in household decision making by observing changes in the time allocation of spouses, following a change in the market penalty of adopting gendered norms in the household division of labor. For a given change in spouses’ relative wages, the intensity of labor reallocation is directly related to the substitutability of spousal inputs in domestic work, and inversely related to the strength of the couple’s norms regarding gender roles in the household. By combining variation in after-tax wages of spouses generated by the introduction of the EITC in Sweden in 2007 and information on parental childcare time available in Swedish registry data, we estimate the elasticity of substitution in home production inputs for the overall population of parents, as well as for demographic groups possibly adhering to differently binding gender norms. We find that couples with a male first-born, married couples, male-breadwinner couples, and foreign-born couples react more strongly to tax changes that induce a more traditional allocation of gender roles, while the respective counterpart couples react more strongly to tax changes that induce a more equal gender division of labor.