Do Austrian Men and Women Become more Equal? At Least in Terms of Labor Supply!

We study the development of wage elasticity of labor supply for Austrian men and womenover time using comparable and representative survey data for the 1980s and 1990s. Theelasticity of men is relatively low and constant over time, similar to the behavior of singlewomen. Most remarkable is the almost continuous reduction in the labor supply reactions ofmarried women: while their elasticity was still several times larger at the beginning of the1980s, they approached rapidly the much less elastic behaviour of men. Thesedevelopments are important for the analysis of deadweight losses of taxation as well as theeffects of tax reforms and wage subsidy programs.