%0 Journal Article %J National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series %D 2019 %T Are Marriage-Related Taxes and Social Security Benefits Holding Back Female Labor Supply? %A Borella, Margherita %A Mariacristina De Nardi %A Yang, Fang %K Labor Supply %K Marriage %K Social Security Benefits %K Taxes %K women %X In the U.S., both taxes and old age Social Security benefits depend on one's marital status and tend to discourage the labor supply of the secondary earner. To what extent are these provisions holding back female labor supply? We estimate a rich life-cycle model of labor supply and savings for couples and singles using the Method of Simulated Moments (MSM) on the 1945 and 1955 birth-year cohorts and we use it to evaluate what would happen without these provisions. Our model matches well the life cycle profiles of labor market participation, hours, and savings for married and single people and generates plausible elasticities of labor supply. Eliminating marriage-related provisions drastically increases the participation of married women over their entire life cycle, reduces the participation of married men after age 55, and increases the savings of couples in both cohorts, including the later one, which has similar participation to that of more recent generations. If the resulting government surplus were used to lower income taxation, there would be large welfare gains for the vast majority of the population. %B National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series %V No. 26097 %8 2019 %G eng %U http://www.nber.org/papers/w26097 %R 10.3386/w26097 %0 Journal Article %J The Journal of the Economics of Ageing %D 2018 %T The aggregate implications of gender and marriage %A Borella, Margherita %A Mariacristina De Nardi %A Yang, Fang %K Employment and Labor Force %K Gender Differences %K Marriage %K Women and Minorities %X Wages, 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. %B The Journal of the Economics of Ageing %V 11 %P 6-26 %8 05/2018 %G eng %U http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212828X16300494 %! The Journal of the Economics of Ageing %R 10.1016/j.jeoa.2017.01.005 %0 Report %D 2017 %T Marriage-related Policies in an Estimated Life-cycle Model of Households' Labor Supply and Savings for Two Cohorts %A Borella, Margherita %A Mariacristina De Nardi %A Yang, Fang %K Labor force participation %K Marriage %K Models %K Social Security %X In the United States, both taxes and old age Social Security benefits explicitly depend on one’s marital status. We study the effects of eliminating these marriage-related provisions on the labor supply and savings of two different cohorts. To do so, we estimate a rich life-cycle model of couples and singles using the method of simulated moments (MSM) on the 1945 and 1955 birth-year cohorts. Our model matches well the life-cycle profiles of labor market participation, hours, and savings for married and single people and generates plausible elasticities of labor supply. We find that these marriage-related provisions reduce the participation of married women over their life cycle, the participation of married men after age 55, and the savings of couples. These effects are large for both the 1945 and 1955 cohorts, even though to start with the latter had much higher labor market participation of married women. %B Working Papers %I Michigan Retirement Research Center %C Ann Arbor, MI %P 1-79 %G eng %U http://mrrc.isr.umich.edu/wp371/ %0 Report %D 2016 %T The Aggregate Implications of Gender and Marriage %A Borella, Margherita %A Mariacristina De Nardi %A Yang, Fang %K Gender Differences %K Marriage %K Older Adults %K Retirement Planning and Satisfaction %K Women and Minorities %X Wages and life expectancy, as well as labor market outcomes, savings, and consumption, differ by gender and marital status. In this paper we compare the aggregate implications of two dynamic structural models. The first model is a standard, quantitative, life-cycle economy, in which people are only heterogenous by age and realized earnings shocks, and is calibrated using data on men, as typically done. The second model is one in which people are also heterogeneous by gender, marital status, wages, and life expectancy, and is calibrated using data for married and single men and women. We show that the standard life-cycle economy misses important aspects of aggregate savings, labor supply, earnings, and consumption. In contrast, the model with richer heterogeneity by gender, marital status, wage, and life expectancy matches the observed data well. We also show that the effects of changing life expectancy and the gender wage gap depend on marital status and gender, and that it is essential to not only model couples, but also the labor supply response of both men and women in a couple. %B NBER Working Paper Series %I National Bureau of Economic Research %C Cambridge, MA %P 1-54 %8 11/2016 %G eng %U http://www.nber.org/papers/w22817.pdf %R 10.3386/w22817