Gender and household labour division - An overlapping generations model.

Details

Supervisors

de la Croix, David

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences économiques, orientation générale, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

The paper tries to explain the gender gap in wages and pensions by looking at the household labour division. An extensive OLG model is build with heterogeneous agents and an adapted time constraint. Household agents are linked by their domestic chores, but agents can off-set some chores to their spouses via their bargaining power or by buying domestic servants. This leads to the second research question: "Can a domestic service subsidy" reduce the gender gaps? The paper finds some evidence that labour division determines gender gaps, but its validity is limited to Western European countries. As for the subsidy to domestic services: the subsidy is mostly effective at targeting the wage gap between men and women.