European Center for Advanced Research in Economics and Statistics

Homepage

Title: ''Women's Labor Force Participation and the Business Cycle"

Abstract: This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of the rise in participation and attachment to the labor force of women and secondary earners. I develop a business cycle model of couples that features labor market frictions, endogenous labor supply, and human capital accumulation. Households face unemployment risk over the business cycle, and secondary earners adjust their labor supply to respond to this risk, so that they are more likely to participate when primary earners are unemployed or face a high risk of job loss. I validate the model using novel empirical evidence documenting that women with higher labor market experience are more likely to respond. A large mass of marginal secondary earners will dampen fluctuations in aggregate employment if in downturns the income effect induced by unemployment is greater than the substitution effect due to lower wages. The magnitude of the counter-cyclical effect is proportional to the distance from the participation frontier of secondary earners, which in turn depends on the gap in net wages between partners. For a gender gap smaller than 20%, aggregate labor supply elasticity of women converges to that of men, and the dampening effect wanes.

Dear all,

Please find attached the invitation to the next Joint Seminar in Macroeconomics by Michele Modugno (Federal Reserve).

on

Decoding Equity Market Reactions to Macroeconomic News
(co-authored with Dino Palazzo)

The seminar will take exceptionally place on Tuesday, December 3^rd from 16:30 until 18:00 in the meeting room on the 1st floor of the office building at Place Sainte-Gudule 19, 1000 Brussels* and will also be able to be followed via a Microsoft Teams meeting.

* Please note that due to office renovations, the seminar will take place at a slightly different location. We kindly ask you to report to the front desk at Place Sainte-Gudule 19 - Sinter-Goedeleplein 19, next to the cathedral.

We hope that you will circulate this invitation to your colleagues.

Please reply by email to nbbmacro.seminar@nbb.be if you wish to participate to this seminar or if you want to have an appointment with the speaker.

Please let us know if you will be physically present or will be following online by Teams. After registration and if you have indicated that you want to join online you will receive a confirmation email with the link to the seminar.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Kind regards,

Pierrick Clerc (ULiège), Ferre De Graeve (KU Leuven), Romain Houssa (UNamur), Robert Kollmann (ULB), Yasin Kursat Önder (UGent), Luca Pensieroso (UCLouvain) and Raf Wouters (NBB)