TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alesina,Alberto
AU  - Ichino,Andrea
AU  - Karabarbounis,Loukas
TI  - Gender Based Taxation and the Division of Family Chores
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13638
PY  - 2007
Y2  - November 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13638
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13638.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alberto F. Alesina
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center 210
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-8388
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: aalesina@harvard.edu

Andrea Ichino
University of Bologna
Dipartimento di Economia
Piazza Scaravilli, 2
40126, Bologna  - Italy
E-Mail: andrea.ichino@unibo.it

Loukas Karabarbounis
University of Chicago
Booth School of Business
5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/834-8327
E-Mail: loukas.karabarbounis@chicagobooth.edu
AB  - Gender-Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey’s rule of optimality because it taxes at a lower rate the more elastic labor supply of women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous. We study GBT in a model in which labor supply elasticities emerge endogenously from the bargained allocation of goods and time in the family. We explore the cases of superior bargaining power for men, higher men wages and higher women productivity in home duties. In all cases, men commit to a career in the market and take less home duties than women. As a result, their market work becomes less substitutable to home duty and their labor supply responds less to changes in the market wage. When society can resolve its distributional concerns efficiently with gender-specific lump sum transfers, GBT with higher marginal tax rates on (single and married) men is optimal. In addition, GBT affects the intrafamily bargaining, leading to a more balanced allocation of labor market outcomes across spouses and a smaller gender gap in labor supply elasticities. 
ER  -