Seminar No. 234

Title: Nonlinear Occupations and Female Labor Supply Over Time

Speaker: Youngsoo Jang, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Time: September 1, 2020 15:00-16:30

Venue: online seminar

About the speaker:

Youngsoo Jang is an assistant professor in the Institute for Advanced Research at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His research interests are in the fields of macroeconomics, public policies, business cycles and computational methods. Youngsoo received his PhD from Ohio State University in 2017 and BA (summa cum laude) from Sogang University in 2011.

Abstract:

High hours worked and higher returns to longer hours worked are common in many occupations, namely nonlinear occupations (Goldin 2014). Over the last four decades, both the share and relative wage premium of nonlinear occupations have been rising. Females have been facing rising experience premiums especially in nonlinear occupations. To quantitatively explore how these changes affected female labor supply over time, we build a quantitative, dynamic general equilibrium model of occupational choice and labor supply at both extensive and intensive margins. A decomposition analysis finds that the rising returns to experience, especially in nonlinear occupations, and technical change biased towards nonlinear occupations are important to explain the intensive margin of female labor supply that keeps rising even in the recent period during which female employment stagnates. Finally, a counterfactual experiment suggests that if the nonlinearities were to be gradually vanishing, female employment could have been higher at the expense of significantly lower intensive margin labor supply.