Arbeitspapier

Biased Wage Expectations and Female Labor Supply

Wage growth occurs almost exclusively in full-time work, whereas it is close to zero in part-time work. German women, when asked to predict their own potential wage outcomes, show severely biased expectations with strong over-optimism about the returns to part-time experience. We estimate a structural life-cycle model to quantify how beliefs influence labor supply, earnings and welfare over the life cycle. The bias increases part-time employment strongly, induces flatter long-run wage profiles, and substantially influences the employment effects of a widely discussed policy reform, the introduction of joint taxation. The most significant impact of the bias appears for college-educated women.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: Discussion Paper ; No. 411

Classification
Wirtschaft
Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
Taxation and Subsidies: Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
Education and Inequality
Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty: Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
Time Allocation and Labor Supply
Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
Subject
returns to experience
biased beliefs
part-time work
dynamic life-cycle models

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Blesch, Maximilian
Eisenhauer, Philipp
Haan, Peter
Ilieva, Boryana
Schrenker, Annekatrin
Weizsäcker, Georg
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Collaborative Research Center Transregio 190 - Rationality and Competition
(where)
München und Berlin
(when)
2023

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET

Data provider

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ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.

Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Blesch, Maximilian
  • Eisenhauer, Philipp
  • Haan, Peter
  • Ilieva, Boryana
  • Schrenker, Annekatrin
  • Weizsäcker, Georg
  • Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Collaborative Research Center Transregio 190 - Rationality and Competition

Time of origin

  • 2023

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