Professors Touhami Abdelkhalek and Dorothée Boccanfuso will conduct the upcoming AIRESS Research Seminar on Thursday, April 9th at 12:30 p.m. They will focus on inequalities of opportunity across the life cycle, analyzing how educational disadvantages and labor market inequalities interact and perpetuate deprivation.

Abstract: 

Over the past two decades, female labour force participation in Morocco has followed a persistent downward trend, reaching some of the lowest levels in the MENA region. Existing reduced-form models are unable to explain this trend as they fail to consider the structural intra-household dynamics that influence women’s participation decisions. This paper addresses this issue by developing, estimating andcalibrating a non-separable collective household model, in which household members jointly maximise a weighted sum of individual utilities. Bargaining weights depend on relative labour income shares and job quality, while individual preferences are represented by a LES (Stone–Geary). Domestic care activities, such as childcare and care for elderly household members, are produced using CES technologies, which allow for imperfect substitutability of time across household members. Women’s paid labour supply is recovered endogenously, thereby capturing participation decisions at the household level. The model is calibrated and microsimulated using the Enquête Nationale sur l’Emploi du Temps du Maroc(HCP, 2011–2012), complemented by the ONDH 2019 survey. Counterfactual simulations reveal that care burdens constrain women’s labour market participation, and that limited intra-household substitutability of care time amplifies this effect. Cash transfer programmes for women yield only modest labour force participation gains. However, when combined with improvements in job quality for women, such interventions generate significant additional participation through their effect on women’s bargaining power within the household. Distributional analyses are conducted across a range of policy scenarios designed to increase female labour market participation. These findings offer concretenguidance for designing targeted policies to meet Morocco’s ambitious female labour force participation targets, such as those set out in the Nouveau Modèle de Développement.