Nonwage attributes, gender, and the future of work

Digital technologies, the Covid crisis, rising incomes, and changing work attitudes all contribute to the recent increase in the importance of certain nonmonetary aspects of work - most prominently flexibility and work meaning. What does this mean for gender differences on the labor market and for the future of work?

MORETHANMONEY will integrate flexibility and work meaning into the theory and empirics of family labor supply and retirement choices.

In three subprojects, I will develop models that combine behavioral, labor and family economics, collect unique data sets that combine administrative, survey and experimental parts, and use structural and reduced-form estimation techniques.

A) I will use models of collective labor supply and newly collected data to analyze the choice of hours worked, flexibility, and time spent with children at the family-level. Choosing flexibility may reduce wages and decision power and thus affect the distribution of family resources.

A hidden cost of recent policies aimed at increasing flexibility may be that wages and bargaining power of women decrease.

B) I will combine the labor economics (flexibility) with the behavioral (meaning of work) perspective and collect data on trade-offs between meaning, flexibility, and wages consistently in several countries.

Choosing occupations and sectors with high meaning (like health and education) may restrict the flexibility choice and force women to reduce their labor supply. C) I will take the long-term perspective.

While wages translate into retirement incomes, nonwage attributes do not, but they may cause an increase in labor supply.

I will model and collect data on trade-offs between wages, hours worked, and nonwage attributes and estimate their effect on retirement decisions over the life cycle. This will greatly increase our understanding of the large differences in retirement incomes between men and women.