HOUSEHOLD INTERACTION AND THE LABOR SUPPLY OF MARRIED WOMEN

Are changing social norms affecting the employment rates of women? A model is built in which the employment of husbands and wives is the outcome of potentially exogenously determined three different types of household games: the Classical household, where the spouses play a Stackelberg leader game in which the wife's labor supply decision is based on her husband's employment outcome; the Modern household, which is characterized by a symmetric and simultaneous game solved as a Nash equilibrium, and the Cooperative household, where the couple jointly maximizes the weighted sum of their utilities. In all models, husbands' employment is similar whereas wives work much less in Classical households.