Sectoral labour supply,choice restrictions and functional form

In this paper we discuss a general framework for analysing labour supply behaviour in the presence of complicated budget and quantity constraints, of which some are unobserved. The individual's labour supply decision is viewed as a choice from a set of discrete alternatives (jobs). These jobs are characterized by attributes such as hours of work, sector‐specific wages and other sector‐specific aspects of the jobs. The labour supply model for married women is estimated on Norwegian data. Wage elasticities and the outcome of a tax reform experiment show that overall labour supply is moderately elastic, but these modest overall responses shadow for much stronger inter‐sectoral changes. Our model is compared with a discrete choice model in which the utility is assumed to be a polynomial. We show that our estimated model has a more economically sensible interpretation and fits the data as well as the alternative approach. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.