Logo
Munich Personal RePEc Archive

Home Production and Gender Gap in Structural Change

Cao, Huoqing and Chen, Chaoran and Xi, Xican (2024): Home Production and Gender Gap in Structural Change.

Warning
There is a more recent version of this item available.
[thumbnail of MPRA_paper_122334.pdf]
Preview
PDF
MPRA_paper_122334.pdf

Download (485kB) | Preview

Abstract

We document that the gender gap in non-agricultural work in developing countries exists primarily among rural married workers, not singles. Rural married women dedicate a much larger portion of time to home production compared to other groups, making them less likely to pursue non-agricultural employment. We extend a general equilibrium Roy model to incorporate the joint labor supply decisions of rural married couples, accounting for gender-specific labor distortions and entry barriers to non-agriculture. Calibrating the model to China, we find that within-household specialization among married couples greatly amplifies the effects of gender-specific labor distortions, and that changes in entry barriers to non-agriculture widened the gender gap in China between 2000 and 2010. Enhancing public services such as childcare facilities can effectively induce more married women to work in non-agriculture. Extrapolating our model globally, it explains a quarter of the variation in the gender gap across countries.

Available Versions of this Item

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact us: mpra@ub.uni-muenchen.de

This repository has been built using EPrints software.

MPRA is a RePEc service hosted by Logo of the University Library LMU Munich.