Gender Inequality from a Spatial Perspective: Location Choice, Marriage Matching, and Labor Supply (Job Market Paper)

Abstract

In this paper, I build a structural model of location choices and marriage market matching under an imperfectly transferable utility framework. I emphasize that both the labor and marriage markets are local. With this model, we can open the black box of intra-household decisions and better understand the gender welfare gap beyond the gender wage gap. I find that the marriage market reduces the dispersion of the spatial distribution of highly skilled workers and can increase some workers’ responsiveness to local wage shocks. Counterfactual analyses show that childcare subsidy financed by the labor income tax encourages people to move to locations that pay higher for their skills, increases marriage rate and labor supply. Childcare subsidy increases aggregate social welfare, decreases welfare gap by gender, but increases welfare gap by education.