The aggregate implications of gender and marriage

Publication date: May 2018Source: The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, Volume 11Author(s): Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi, Fang YangAbstractWages, labor market participation, hours worked, and savings differ by gender and marital status. In addition, women and married people make up a large fraction of the population and of labor market participants, total hours worked, and total earnings. For the most part, macroeconomists have been ignoring women and marriage in setting up structural models and in calibrating them using data on males only. In this paper, we ask whether ignoring gender and marriage in both models and data implies that the resulting calibration matches well the key economic aggregates. We find that it does not and we ask whether there are other calibration strategies or relatively simple models of marriage that can improve the fit of the model to aggregate data.

Source: The Journal of the Economics of Ageing - July 5, 2018 Category: Health Management Source Type: research