The Labor Supply of Married Men: A Switching Regressions Model

Abstract

According to the family utility function approach, the labor supply functions of married men should differ according to whether or not their wives also work. In this paper I explicitly model the switching nature of labor supply while also accounting for the endogeneity of the labor force participation decision of the wife, using an endogenous switching regressions model based on the quadratic family utility function. The model is estimated from a cross-section of 1210 married couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.