Essays On Gender And The Macroeconomy PDF Download

In my dissertation I study how differences in gender and marital status affect aggregate labor market outcomes in the economy.In my first chapter "Cyclicality of Hours Worked by Married Women and Spousal Insurance", I document that married women's hours worked are less cyclical than married men's and singles' hours and argue that spousal insurance contributes to the low cyclicality. Analyzing volatility and transition rates, I show that married women are less likely to leave the labor force during recessions, but not more likely to join. In my second chapter "Spousal Insurance, Precautionary Labor Supply, and the Business Cycle", I document that married women are less likely to leave the labor force and are more attached to employment in recessions. Using a two-person household incomplete assets markets model with labor market frictions, I show that married women exhibit precautionary labor supply in response to the higher threat of job loss experienced by their husband in recessions. Quantitative analysis shows that married women's precautionary labor supply behavior is an important mechanism of intra-household risk sharing and accounts for 30% of married women's low employment cyclicality. Furthermore, I show that spousal insurance reduces married households' consumption volatility by 30% over the business cycle.In my third chapter "From Trend to Cycle: the Changing Careers of Married Women and Business Cycle Risk" (joint with Amanda Michaud), we show that the rise in hours and employment of married women has been driven by a rise of "career women" with highly persistent full-time participation. We derive implications of this secular change for the cyclically aggregate labor using a unified theory. We find that, while the hours cyclicality varies greatly across career types, the changing composition of careers and families nets little change in the aggregate hours cyclicality, but redistributes the cyclical risk across household types.