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Gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand()

This paper examines the role of heterogeneity in a real business cycle model, which traditionally has not fully captured the relative volatility of hours to output. Men and women have different cyclical volatilities in hours worked, which is robust to different filtering methods. This empirical regu...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Guisinger, Amy Y.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier Inc. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7489220/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32952239
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmacro.2020.103254
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author Guisinger, Amy Y.
author_facet Guisinger, Amy Y.
author_sort Guisinger, Amy Y.
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description This paper examines the role of heterogeneity in a real business cycle model, which traditionally has not fully captured the relative volatility of hours to output. Men and women have different cyclical volatilities in hours worked, which is robust to different filtering methods. This empirical regularity is used to motivate a standard RBC model augmented to allow for two different agents following Jaimovich et al. (2013). These two agents have identical utility functions, but face different elasticities of labor demand due to their different complementarities with capital. These estimated elasticities find that women are more complementary to capital. The calibrated model generates the cyclical volatility of work hours by gender and for the total hours worked that matches the U.S. data better than the traditional representative agent model. I then explore other extensions to this model including investigating the stability of the estimated labor demand elasticities and allowing for various Frisch elasticities of labor supply. This paper demonstrates that allowing for even broad levels of heterogeneity in a simple framework can increase the model’s tractability with the data. Since gender is important to explain U.S. business cycle dynamics, we need to carefully consider heterogeneity when analyzing counter-cyclical economic policy, as it may not have symmetric effects across assorted groups.
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spelling pubmed-74892202020-09-15 Gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand() Guisinger, Amy Y. J Macroecon Article This paper examines the role of heterogeneity in a real business cycle model, which traditionally has not fully captured the relative volatility of hours to output. Men and women have different cyclical volatilities in hours worked, which is robust to different filtering methods. This empirical regularity is used to motivate a standard RBC model augmented to allow for two different agents following Jaimovich et al. (2013). These two agents have identical utility functions, but face different elasticities of labor demand due to their different complementarities with capital. These estimated elasticities find that women are more complementary to capital. The calibrated model generates the cyclical volatility of work hours by gender and for the total hours worked that matches the U.S. data better than the traditional representative agent model. I then explore other extensions to this model including investigating the stability of the estimated labor demand elasticities and allowing for various Frisch elasticities of labor supply. This paper demonstrates that allowing for even broad levels of heterogeneity in a simple framework can increase the model’s tractability with the data. Since gender is important to explain U.S. business cycle dynamics, we need to carefully consider heterogeneity when analyzing counter-cyclical economic policy, as it may not have symmetric effects across assorted groups. Elsevier Inc. 2020-12 2020-09-14 /pmc/articles/PMC7489220/ /pubmed/32952239 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmacro.2020.103254 Text en © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Guisinger, Amy Y.
Gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand()
title Gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand()
title_full Gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand()
title_fullStr Gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand()
title_full_unstemmed Gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand()
title_short Gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand()
title_sort gender differences in the volatility of work hours and labor demand()
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7489220/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32952239
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmacro.2020.103254
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