The Netherlands combines a high female employment rate with a high part-time employment rate. This is likely to be the result of (societal) preferences as the removal of institutional barriers has not led to higher working hours. We investigate the development of working hours over successive generations of women using the Dutch Labour Force Survey 1992-2005. We find evidence of a strictly increasing propensity to work part-time and a decreasing propensity to work full-time for the generations born after the early 1950s. Our results are in line with results of studies on social norms and attitudes. It seems likely that without changes in (societal) preferences part-time employment is indeed here to stay. Copyright 2010 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. ABSTRACT Analyzing Female Labor Supply: Evidence from a Dutch Tax ReformAmong OECD countries, the Netherlands has average female labor force participation, but by far the highest rate of part-time work. This paper investigates the extent to which married women respond to financial incentives. We exploit the exogenous variation caused by a substantial Dutch tax reform in 2001. Our main conclusion is that the positive significant effect of tax reform on labor force participation dominates the negative insignificant effect on working hours. Our preferred explanation is that women respond more to changes in tax allowances than to changes in marginal tax rates. JEL Classification:H24, J22, J38

We use a large and rich administrative household panel data set to estimate labour supply responses for a large number of subgroups in the Netherlands. The identification of the parameters benefits from a major tax reform in the data period. We uncover large differences in behavioural responses. In particular, we find differences in labour supply responses between households with and without children that are much bigger than suggested by previous studies that had to pool these household types in the estimation of preferences. An efficient tax-benefit system should take the substantial heterogeneity in behavioural responses into account.

We extend the bunching approach introduced by Saez (Am Econ J Econ Policy 2:180-212, 2010) by proposing an intuitive, data-driven procedure to determine the bunching window. By choosing the bunching window ad hoc, researchers throw away informative data points for estimating the counterfactual income distribution in the absence of the kink. Assuming a descending bunching mass to both sides of the threshold, the proposed algorithm produces a distribution of lower and upper bounds for the bunching window. In each iteration, the bunching window is defined as all contiguous bin midpoints around the threshold that lie outside of the confidence band resulting from running a local regression through all data points outside of the excluded region. Monte Carlo simulations provide evidence that our data-driven procedure outperforms larger bunching windows in terms of bias and efficiency. In our application for the Netherlands, we find clear evidence of bunching behaviour at all three thresholds of the Dutch tax schedule with a precisely estimated elasticity of 0.023 at the upper threshold, which is driven by self-employed, women and joint tax filers.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. The standard human capital model predicts that, as a result of human capital obsolescence, mobility becomes more costly when workers become older. We measure and interpret how changing job opportunities across 96 occupations affect different age and skill groups. Older workers end up in shrinking occupations, in occupations with a lower share of high-skilled workers, in occupations facing a higher threat of offshoring tasks abroad, more focus on routine-intensive tasks and less rewarding job content. This process is not only observed for the oldest group of workers, but for workers aged 40 and above. Observing older workers in declining occupations is to a large extent a market outcome, but declining job opportunities in terms of less satisfying working conditions and job tasks and content could potentially raise incentives to retire early.JEL Classification: J24, J60