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 women over time using comparable and representative survey data for the 1980s and 1990s. The elasticity of men is relatively low and constant over time, similar to the behavior of single women. Most remarkable is the almost continuous reduction in the labor supply reactions of married women: while their elasticity was still several times larger at the beginning of the 1980s, they approached rapidly the much less elastic behaviour of men. These developments are important for the analysis of deadweight losses of taxation as well as the effects of tax reforms and wage subsidy programs.