Andrea Mattia (Bank of Italy)
Across the world, women carry out a larger share of housework (including childcare) compared to men, which can negatively affect both fertility and women's career. The time allocated to housework depends on spouses' comparative advantage, on the competing uses of time, and long-term, personal or external factors that have often been unobservable in the data. I use detailed time use data from Italy within a new dynamic life-cycle model of marriage, employment and fertility, where individuals choose their time allocation to formal work, housework, and leisure. The key contribution of the model is that it can estimate to what extent each of these factors determine differences in housework among spouses. To rationalize gender differences, the model estimates that men's housework productivity should be about one fourth as women's. In a counterfactual exercise, a zero gender wage gap paired with free, perfectly available nursery schools, increases fertility to 2.2 (+56.1%) children per woman and married women's employment rate to 0.57 (+15.6%). If men were as home productive as women, the results would be 2.55 (+81%) and 0.98 (+99.8%) respectively. I also simulate the transition after increasing nursery school availability to 33%: 3 and 9 years after the policy, respectively, fertility increases by 1.8% and 6.1%, married women's employment increases by 2.8% and 3.4%, and tax revenues increase by 0.11% and 0.17%. Gender differences in contribution to housework account for up to 70% of the child penalty in womens earnings. The model can be used to produce comparable results across European countries using the Harmonised European Time Use Surveys.