We examine the role of cognitive ability and personality traits in a gift exchange experiment. Controlling for cognitive ability and personality characteristics, men offer higher wages than women, and men and women with greater cognitive ability and greater agreeableness on the Big Five personality scale offer higher wages as well. Men provide greater effort than women do, and respond to higher wage rates with greater increases in effort. For both genders, one standard deviation increases in agreeableness and in wages generate similar increases in effort. Serious biases arise from omitting cognitive ability and pooling men and women.

Empirical studies cast doubt on the efficiency assumption made in standard economic models of household behavior. In couples, the allocation of time between activities remains highly differentiated by gender. In this paper we examine whether couples deviate from efficiency in household production, using an experimental design. We compare the allocation of gendered vs. gender-neutral domestic tasks. Our results show that women in the household overspecialize in “feminine tasks” and men in “masculine tasks” compared to what their comparative advantage would require, hence revealing the influence of gender roles and stereotypes on the couples’ behavior.

This study investigates whether individuals engage in prosocial behavior when it requires an investment of their time, but not money. In a laboratory experiment with rigorous anonymity arrangements, senders receive their payoff at the beginning. They may then engage in a tedious task to increase the earnings of exogenously disadvantaged recipients who otherwise receive no earnings. We find that senders are willing to sacrifice time to benefit recipients. Whether or not the recipient is present in the laboratory during the working time does not alter this decision. However, in a treatment variation some senders also display antisocial behavior.

This study explores the relationship between maternal working hours and a child's emotional well-being using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Child well-being is assessed through self-reported happiness and a well-being index that includes concerns, temperament, bullying, and behaviour. Results show a positive association between maternal employment and child well-being, supported by factor analysis combining child, mother, and teacher reports. The association remains consistent across income levels and is unaffected by commuting time or cohabitation status. These findings highlight the importance of maternal employment and contextual factors in shaping child well-being.

This paper examines how number of siblings affects employment under the relaxation of the One-Child Policy in China. We explore the One-and-A-Half-Child Policy in 1980s and examine its long-term impact on siblings and employment. With the data from 2010–2018 China Family Panel Studies, we find that individuals tend to have a larger number of siblings and have a higher probability of working in the places where the One-and-A-Half-Child Policy was implemented earlier. Using the degree of the impact of this policy as an instrumental variable for number of siblings, we find that one more sibling would increase the likelihood of working by 9.0 percentage points and increase the likelihood of working in the non-agricultural sector by 5.1 percentage points. Females are more affected by the relaxation than males. We also discuss the major mechanisms through which siblings affect employment. We find that the care-sharing effect of siblings increases labor supply and the social network effect of siblings brings more job opportunities and increases employment. The One-and-A-Half-Child Policy improves the labor market outcomes through both the channel of sharing care and the channel of social network.

We highlight the role of home productivity and social norms in explaining the gender gap in labor force participation (LFP), and the non-monotonic relationship of women's LFP with their education in India. We construct a model of couples’ time allocation decisions allowing for both market and home productivity to improve with own education. Incorporating individual preference to produce a minimum level of the home good due to social norms, we show that our theoretical model can closely replicate the U-shaped relationship between women's education and their labor supply. Our analysis suggests that home productivity, along with social benchmarks on couples’ time allocation to home good, can be critical determinants of women's labor supply in developing countries.

This paper analyzes the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the within-household gender gap in relation to paid work hours in full-time employed heterosexual couples in Spain. Using the Spanish Labor Force Survey (2019–2020) and a difference-in-differences method, we analyze three stages of the pandemic: strict lockdown, de-escalation, and partial closures to study the short-term effects and potential medium-term effects on gender inequality in terms of paid work hours. Our results suggest that during the strict lockdown period there was a tendency to fall back on traditional family gendered patterns to manage the work–life balance, especially when young children are present in male-headed households. However, this phenomenon seems to be a short-term consequence of the pandemic. The sector of activity (essential or non-essential) has also played a key role, the gender gap increased in male-headed households with female partners employed in non-essential sectors.

We study a parent's demand for gratitude from his child. We view this demand as an intervening variable between the parent's earnings and the incidence of child labor. The demand for gratitude arises from the desire of a parent to receive care and support from his child late in life, while the inclination of the child to provide this support during his adulthood is determined by how the child was treated by his parent during childhood. Specifically, we model the child's gratitude as an inverse function of the intensity of his labor in childhood. We show that when we keep the child's (imputed) wage constant, the intensity of child labor decreases with the parent's earnings. However, when we make the child's (imputed) wage a function of the parent's earnings, then the outcome can be different. With the help of a numerical example, we show that the pattern of child labor related to the parent's earnings can be U-shaped.

This paper uses Socio-Economic Surveys covering the period from 2013 to 2019 and the 2015 Time Use Survey to investigate the extent to which household consumption changes at retirement in Thailand. A fuzzy regression discontinuity design is applied to evaluate the retirement effect on total household expenditure and expenditures on four major categories: food-at-home, work-related items, non-durable entertainment, and others. The results reveal that retirement decreases household expenditure by 11%. Further investigations show that the dramatic declines in expenditures on work-related and non-durable entertainment contribute significantly to the spending drop at retirement. The magnitudes of the declines are more pronounced for low-income and low-wealth households. The results also indicate that the retirees spend more leisure time on home production activities after retirement. Once accounting for this effect, it finds that the drop in total household expenditure decreases to 6%. These results suggest that the sizable consumption expenditure drop at retirement is due to substituting away from market purchased goods toward home-produced goods.

Tolerance of sexual minorities is presumed to matter, but its effects are under-studied. Because tolerance can affect both experiences at work and division of labor in the household, we study the relationship between tolerance and the time cohabiting gay men and lesbian women spend in paid work across the United States. In the average state, the increase in tolerance between 2003 and 2015 is associated with an increase in paid work of about 1 week per year among cohabiting gay men. Though not robustly statistically significant, the increase in tolerance is associated with a decrease in paid work among cohabiting lesbian women relative to heterosexual women.

This paper contributes to the migration literature studying the time devoted to educational activities. It uses US time-diary surveys to study the allocation of time to informal as well as formal learning and educational activities by immigrants and natives. We develop a simple theoretical framework, which highlights the different constraints/opportunity costs faced by immigrants as compared with natives. Consistently with our theoretical model, the estimates show that immigrants are more likely to engage in informal and formal education and conditional on participation, they allocate more time to these activities. We find that the main drivers are economic incentives, mostly in the early phase of working life, and that the differences between natives and immigrants persist across generations. We also find that differences between immigrants and natives are generally larger in informal education than in formal education. The investment in informal and formal learning and educational activities is likely to boost immigrants' human and social capital and contribute to their socio-economic integration.

Well-functioning factor markets play an important role in improving the performance of the agricultural sector. Our paper examines both technical and allocative efficiencies at the household level, with an application to a cross-section sample of rural households in three provinces of China in 2009. In a first step, we use nonparametric methods to estimate household efficiency. In a second step, we examine econometrically the role of land rental market and its linkages with household-level efficiencies. We find that participation in the land rental market does not affect technical efficiency but has large positive effects on allocative efficiency. This stresses the need to distinguish between technical efficiency and allocative efficiency in the analysis of land tenure issues. The improvements in allocative efficiency from land-leasing contribute to significant increases in household income in rural China.

Cet article revient sur l'interprétation théorique de l'élasticité du nombre d'heures travaillées aux salaires en tenant compte de la demande de travail à temps partiel dans le cadre d'un modèle d'équilibre de recherche en emploi. Une entreprise propose des emplois à temps partiel ou complet en fonction de la variabilité de sa demande, de ses coûts salariaux et de ses coûts d'embauché. Les travailleurs les acceptent ou non selon leur utilité, qui dépend du salaire et des heures. Cette économie admet un équilibre de Nash pour lequel toutes les entreprises emploient des salariés à temps partiel et à temps complet. Des simulations montrent que la relation entre heures et salaires dépend principalement de la demande des entreprise et non de la préférence pour le loisir des individus.