Gender Identity And Household Labor Supply

Using the CHIP database,we show that the distribution of the share of income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp drop to the right of 0.5.We argue that this pattern is caused by gender identity norms,which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife's income exceeds the husband' income.By constructing marriage market group and computing the probability of that women earn more than men in the marriage market and marriage rate in each market group,we show the regression of marriage rate and the probability that women earn more than men,and we verify that the Chinese really does exist gender identity.The gender identity will lower the marriage rate in the group where a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man.At the same time,we can expect the gender identity have an impact on the labor supply in the household,which means that the higher the wife's income is than husband,the more likely wife will reduce the labor supply.But this effect of gender identity against labor supply is contrary to the traditional theory of comparative advantage.Innovation of this paper is to propose and verify the gender identity' s effect for labor supply and the income effect of the traditional comparative advantage theory exist at the same time,but which one is larger depends on the level of household income.The improvement of income level can reduce the marginal effect of income and reduce the income effect.The empirical evidence shows that the gender identity has a negative effect on labor supply,and the negative influence will gradually show up with the improvement of income level.When the income level is low,the income effect of comparative advantage theory is dominant;When income levels are high,the cost effect of gender identity will dominate.The negative influence of gender identity on the labor supply in the family depends on the improvement of income level,which can partly explain the decline of China's female labor participation rate since the reform of the system.