Register: https://forms.gle/24tM4MAr5LeoQLGa6 

Many couples face a trade-off between advancing one spouse’s career or the other’s. Notowidigdo studies this trade-off using administrative data from Germany and Sweden. He first conducts an event-study analysis of couples moving across commuting zones and find that relocation increases men’s earnings more than women’s, with strikingly similar patterns in Germany and Sweden. Using a sample of mass layoff events, he then find that couples in both countries are more likely to relocate in response to the man being laid off compared to the woman. He investigates whether these gendered patterns reflect men’s higher potential earnings or a gender norm that prioritizes men’s career advancement. He provides suggestive evidence of a gender norm using variation in norms within Germany. He then develops and estimate a model of household decision-making in which households can place more weight on the income earned by the man compared to the woman. In both countries, the estimated model can accurately reproduce the reduced-form results, including those not used to estimate the model. The results point to a role for gender norms in explaining the gender gap in the returns to joint moves.