📈 economics

What Determines Women’s Low Labor Supply in Morocco? Home Production, Bargaining Power, and Social Norms in a Collective Household Model

This paper utilizes a collective household model with home production to demonstrate that women's low labor supply in Morocco is driven not by labor-market conditions alone, but by an efficient yet unequal allocation of time where high domestic burdens and rigid social norms constrain market participation despite rising education and relative earnings.

Original authors: Sara LOUKILI, Said Hanchane, Mustapha Ziroili

Published 2026-07-14

📖 6 min read🧠 Deep dive

CC BY 4.0

Original authors: Sara LOUKILI, Said Hanchane, Mustapha Ziroili

Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). ✨ This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer

Imagine Morocco as a giant, bustling kitchen where families are trying to figure out who cooks, who shops, and who goes out to earn money to buy groceries. For a long time, economists thought the puzzle of why so many Moroccan women weren't working outside the home was simple: maybe there weren't enough jobs, or maybe the pay was too low.

But this paper suggests that's only half the story. It argues that the real mystery isn't just about the job market; it's about what happens inside the house. The authors, Sara Loukili, Said Hanchane, and Mustapha Ziroili, propose that families act like a team of two players (a wife and a husband) who are constantly negotiating how to split their time between three things: working for money, doing housework (like cooking and cleaning), and just relaxing.

The Big Discovery: The "Double Shift" Trap

The paper's main finding is that even when women get more education and can earn good money, they often don't work more hours outside the home because they are still stuck doing almost all the housework.

Think of it like a video game where the "Housework" button is glued to the wife's character. Even if she levels up her "Earning Power" skill, the game doesn't automatically give the "Housework" button to the husband. The data shows that among couples where both spouses work, the wife spends about 5 hours a day on domestic and care work, while the husband spends less than 1 hour. That's a massive gap.

The authors measured this using data from 2012, combining a survey about jobs (the National Employment Survey) with a diary-style survey about how people spent their time (the National Time Use Survey). They looked at 866 couples where both the husband and wife had jobs.

What the Paper Says is NOT the Answer

The paper explicitly argues against a few common ideas:

It's not just about "Income Pooling": Some old theories said that in a happy family, money is just a big pot that everyone shares, so it doesn't matter who earns it. The authors found this is false. They showed that who earns the money does matter. When a wife earns more relative to her husband, it changes how the family makes decisions. The family isn't just a single unit with one brain; it's two people with different influences.
It's not just about "More Jobs": The paper suggests that simply creating more jobs or raising wages isn't enough to fix the problem. If a woman gets a job but the family still expects her to do all the cooking and childcare, she might just work fewer hours or quit. The "domestic constraint" is still holding her back.
It's not a "Failure" of the family: The authors found something surprising. The families aren't necessarily fighting or being inefficient. They are actually acting like a "collective" unit that is very good at making decisions together, but those decisions are unequal. They are efficient at keeping the house running, but they are inefficient at sharing the load fairly.

The Urban vs. Rural Twist

Here is where the story gets really interesting, and it flips the script on what you might expect.

Usually, we think city life is more modern and rural life is more traditional. But in Morocco, the data shows a reversal for working women:

Rural wives who work actually spend more time in the market (working for money) than at home. They do about 6.4 hours of market work and 3.4 hours of housework.
Urban wives who work do the opposite. They spend only 3.1 hours working for money but 5.6 hours at home.

Why? The authors suggest that in rural areas, economic necessity and agricultural work pull women into the workforce. In cities, even though there are more formal jobs, social norms and the lack of affordable help (like cheap childcare or cleaning services) keep urban women tied to the home. The city is where the "incomplete marketization" of women's time is most visible.

The "Bargaining Power" Test

The researchers tested if giving a wife more money (relative to her husband) would make the husband do more housework. This is the "bargaining power" test.

The result? It didn't work as hoped.
While a wife earning more money did change how the family made decisions (proving they aren't just a single unit), it did not lead to a big shift in housework. The husband didn't suddenly start cooking and cleaning to balance the scales. The "sharing rule" changed slightly, but the housework stayed glued to the wife.

The paper suggests this is because of social norms. Even if a wife has more power, the "rules" of the house (and society) say that housework is her job. It's like having a powerful player on a team who is still forced to play the same boring position everyone else expects them to play.

How Sure Are They?

The authors are quite confident in their numbers because they used real data from 866 couples and ran strict statistical tests.

They proved that the "income pooling" idea (where it doesn't matter who earns) is wrong.
They measured that the family acts efficiently but unequally.
They suggest that social norms and the lack of market substitutes (like cheap childcare) are the main reasons women's time isn't fully "marketized" in cities.

They don't claim to have solved the whole puzzle of why women don't work, but they have shown that the answer lies in the kitchen, not just the office.

The Takeaway

The paper concludes that you can't fix low female employment just by building more factories or schools. You have to fix the "kitchen." If a woman wants to work more, the family needs to either:

Let the husband do more housework, OR
Buy services (like childcare or cleaning) to replace the housework.

Until the "Housework Button" gets unglued from the wife's character, raising her education or wages won't automatically make her work more hours. The solution, the authors say, is to treat childcare and transport not just as "social issues," but as essential parts of the labor market.

Technical Summary: What Determines Women's Low Labor Supply in Morocco?

Problem Statement
The paper addresses a persistent development puzzle in Morocco: despite a sustained expansion of female education over the last generation, female labor force participation (FLFP) remains low. Standard labor-market explanations—such as wages, unemployment, or sectoral composition—fail to fully account for why rising human capital does not translate into a proportional increase in married women's market work. The authors argue that the issue is not solely a labor-market failure but a household allocation problem. Specifically, the paper investigates whether the "puzzle" is explained by the intra-household allocation of time between market work, home production, and leisure, constrained by social norms and bargaining dynamics.

Methodology
The study employs a collective household model with home production, extending the framework of Chiappori (1988) and Apps and Rees (1997). The theoretical model posits that a household (wife $f$ and husband $m$ ) maximizes a weighted sum of individual utilities derived from private consumption, leisure, and a household good produced via domestic time and market inputs.

Data Strategy: The analysis combines two 2012 nationally representative surveys:
1. The National Employment Survey (NES): Used to estimate gender- and area-specific wage equations (urban/rural, men/women) using a Heckman selection correction to account for non-random wage observation.
2. The National Time Use Survey (NTUS): Used to measure daily time allocation (market work, domestic/care work, leisure).
- Imputation: Predicted wages from the NES are imputed into the NTUS to create a dataset containing both time use and earning capacity for spouses.
Samples:
- Primary Sample: 866 dual-earner couples. This sample allows for the estimation of an interior solution in the collective model (intensive margin).
- Extended Sample: A wider sample including non-working wives, analyzed via a reduced-form bivariate Tobit model to address the extensive margin (participation decision).
Identification:
- Distribution Factors: The wife's relative earnings are used as the primary distribution factor to test the "income pooling" hypothesis.
- Estimation: The core model uses Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) to jointly estimate four time-allocation equations (wife market, wife unpaid, husband market, husband unpaid).
- Tests: The study tests for the rejection of the unitary model (via income pooling tests) and the validity of the collective model (via Slutsky-type symmetry restrictions).

Key Contributions

Theoretical: The paper constructs a collective model integrating home production to highlight three distinct channels affecting labor supply: market productivity, home productivity, and social norms governing the gendered division of unpaid work. It distinguishes between decision-making involvement and actual household power (Pareto weights).
Empirical: It overcomes the data limitation in Morocco (where no single survey contains both wages and detailed time use) by merging the NES and NTUS. It provides the first collective-model estimation of Moroccan household time allocation using imputed wages.
Conceptual: It reframes the low FLFP issue as a constraint on the "marketization" of women's time. The paper argues that even if women enter paid work, the household may not release their time from domestic production if market substitutes are unavailable or if norms bind.

Key Results

Descriptive Facts:
- Among dual-earner couples, wives perform approximately 5 hours of domestic/care work per day, compared to less than 1 hour for husbands.
- Urban-Rural Reversal: Urban wives work fewer market hours and more domestic hours than rural wives, despite urban areas having more formal employment opportunities. Rural wives often work more in the market than at home due to agricultural/informal labor demands.
Model Estimates (Dual-Earner Sample):
- Rejection of Unitary Model: The wife's relative earnings are jointly significant across time-allocation equations, rejecting the income pooling hypothesis. This confirms the household behaves as a collective unit where the identity of the earner matters.
- Efficiency: Slutsky-type symmetry restrictions are not rejected, suggesting the household allocation is Pareto efficient, even if unequal.
- Bargaining Power Limits: While higher relative earnings for wives shift the sharing rule, they do not generate a meaningful reallocation of domestic work to husbands. The coefficient on relative earnings for husband's unpaid work is small and imprecise.
- Wage Effects: In the dual-earner sample, a wife's own imputed wage does not significantly increase her market hours. Conversely, a husband's higher wage is positively associated with the wife's market work, suggesting assortative matching rather than a simple income effect.
Reduced-Form Extension (Bivariate Tobit):
- For the wider sample, higher wife income shares are associated with both increased market work and increased domestic work. This confirms the signature of incomplete marketization: women enter the labor market without a proportional reduction in their domestic burden.

Significance and Claims
The paper concludes that Morocco's low female labor supply is partly a household phenomenon driven by the incomplete marketization of home production. The transition to female marketization is stalled not because women lack education or job opportunities, but because the household does not reallocate unpaid work to husbands, nor does it fully substitute unpaid work with market services.

Policy Implication: The authors argue that labor-market reforms (job creation, wage increases) alone are insufficient. Effective policy must target the domestic cost of working. This includes reducing the cost of home production through childcare, eldercare, transport, and time-saving infrastructure. Furthermore, legal reforms that strengthen women's outside options (e.g., enforcement of the Family Code) are framed as essential labor-market policies because they can shift the intra-household sharing rule.
Modesty of Claims: The authors explicitly note limitations, including the use of cross-sectional data (preventing dynamic analysis of bargaining over the life cycle) and the reliance on imputed wages (interpreted as reduced-form associations with earning capacity rather than exogenous price shocks). They caution against interpreting the sex ratio as a clean instrumental variable due to potential confounding with migration and local norms.

In summary, the paper posits that the Moroccan puzzle is an efficient but unequal household equilibrium where social norms and high home-productivity constraints prevent the full marketization of women's time, even as their education and earning capacity rise.