Labor Supply Responses and Adjustment Frictions: A Tax-Free Year in Iceland

Abstract

Labor income earned in Iceland in 1987 went untaxed. I use this episode to study labor supply responses to temporary wage changes. I construct a new population-wide dataset of earnings and working time from pay slips and use two identification strategies to estimate intensive and extensive margin Frisch elasticities of 0.37 and 0.10, respectively. Workers with the ability to adjust drive these average responses: extensive margin responses by young and close-to-retirement cohorts and intensive margin responses by workers in temporally flexible jobs. However, constrained workers take up secondary jobs, which contribute to one-tenth of the overall response. Importantly, married women with children and the wives of men in temporally inflexible jobs respond more strongly than other women do. Within families, wives respond more than do their husbands, who themselves respond negatively to their wives’ tax cuts. This is consistent with substitutability in nonmarket time. Overall, my results suggest that adjustment frictions reduce aggregate labor supply responses to tax cuts and can similarly explain differences in elasticities within and across countries.