A Structural Model of the Labor Market to Understand Gender Gaps among Marginalized Roma Communities
This paper constructs and estimates a household-level search model to analyze Roma spouses' utility maximization for leisure, home production, and work. The paper aims to explain labor market gender gaps in a marginalized Roma population with low labor market participation rates (males 53 percent and females 17 percent). The analysis uses data from the 2017 Regional Roma Survey for six Western Balkan countries. The simulation results show that the main source for gender differentials in the labor market is the unequal opportunities in favor of males -- not gender preferences or differences in home production productivity. Therefore, most of the gender differences in the labor market can be closed by providing wives the same labor market conditions as husbands. Counterfactual policy experiments show that policies that increase the frequency of receiving a job offer, decrease the frequency of laying off workers, and reduce search increase Roma husbands' labor participation. Policies that equalize wages induces more wives to join the labor market and husbands to withdraw from it. This outcome signals that the wage gap is the dimension that deters the greatest number of Roma wives from joining the labor market.
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper biblioteca |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2020-09
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| Subjects: | GENDER GAP, LABOR MARKET, LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION, ROMA, MARGINALIZED ROMA, UNEMPLOYMENT, WESTERN BALKANS, HIRING BIAS, LAYOFFS, FEMALE LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION, |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/656651600182143076/A-Structural-Model-of-the-Labor-Market-to-Understand-Gender-Gaps-among-Marginalized-Roma-Communities https://hdl.handle.net/10986/34484 |
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| Summary: | This paper constructs and estimates a
household-level search model to analyze Roma spouses'
utility maximization for leisure, home production, and work.
The paper aims to explain labor market gender gaps in a
marginalized Roma population with low labor market
participation rates (males 53 percent and females 17
percent). The analysis uses data from the 2017 Regional Roma
Survey for six Western Balkan countries. The simulation
results show that the main source for gender differentials
in the labor market is the unequal opportunities in favor of
males -- not gender preferences or differences in home
production productivity. Therefore, most of the gender
differences in the labor market can be closed by providing
wives the same labor market conditions as husbands.
Counterfactual policy experiments show that policies that
increase the frequency of receiving a job offer, decrease
the frequency of laying off workers, and reduce search
increase Roma husbands' labor participation. Policies
that equalize wages induces more wives to join the labor
market and husbands to withdraw from it. This outcome
signals that the wage gap is the dimension that deters the
greatest number of Roma wives from joining the labor market. |
|---|