Taxation and Labor Supply of Married Women across Countries: A Macroeconomic Analysis

We document contemporaneous differences in the aggregate labor supply of married couples across 18 OECD countries along the extensive and the intensive margin. We quantify the contribution of international differences in non-linear labor income taxes and consumption taxes, as well as gender wage gaps and educational premia, to the international differences in the data. Our model replicates the comparatively small cross-country differences of married men's hours worked very well. Moreover, taxes and wages account for a large part of the observed large differences in married women's labor supply between the US and Europe. The non-linearity of labor income taxes leads to substantially different effects of taxation on married men and women. We find that going to a system of strictly separate taxation would increase labor supply of married women by more than 100 hours annually in a third of our sample countries.