Arnau Valladares-Esteban

We use a simple theoretical framework, a building block of many macroeconomic models, to study the prominently debated relationship between the model parametrisation of the Frisch elasticity and the reduced-form evidence on the elasticity of labour. Focusing on tax holidays, we show that the elasticity measured with a reduced-form approach is only equal to the Frisch-elasticity parameter if there are no income or general equilibrium effects. Furthermore, for a wide range of standard values of the Frisch-elasticity parameter, the response of labour generated by a tax holiday in the model is aligned with the reduced-form evidence.

In this paper we document that married individuals face a lower unemployment rate than their single counterparts. We refer to this phenomenon as the marriage unemployment gap. Despite the dramatic demographic changes in the labor market over the last decades, this gap has been remarkably stable both for men and women. Using a flow-decomposition exercise, we assess which transition probabilities (across labor force states) are behind the marriage unemployment gap. We find that, for men, the higher attachment to employment of married males is the main driver of the gap. For females, we find that the participation margin plays a crucial role.

We use a simple macroeconomic model to illustrate the difference between the Frisch elasticity, understood as a structural behavioural parameter, and the elasticity of labour measured through a tax holiday; a setup used in the micro-applied literature to measure the responsiveness of labour to changes in the returns to work. We show that a high Frisch elasticity is compatible with a measured elasticity of the same order of magnitude as the micro-applied estimates.