and wives’ optimal home production time. Adding an additional member’s labor decisions will increase the household labor market states to 64, plus home production optimal time allocation per agent. Including that dimension (extended families rather than spouses making choices) into the current specification is computationally costly and complex to program/code.

**Second, this paper uses search cost and taste/productivity/social norms to explain nonparticipation, but other sources of nonparticipation such as nonlabor income and health status should also be studied.** The nonparticipation rates for Roma are high compared to international standards. Among the usual explanations for high nonparticipation rates are the disincentive effects of nonlabor income (which also includes household subsidies, social assistance schemes, pensions, and transfers from other households) or health status. The RRS includes these dimensions but analyzing them was out of the scope of this paper. These are areas that can be further explored in future research.

**In this direction, even when we included gender norms over leisure, home production, and search cost, we are not explicitly modeling cultural norms such as the imposed restriction on females to only do housework and not enter the labor market.** Therefore, our results should be interpreted as an upper bound for household reactions to different policies. Further work could explore the introduction of such social barriers into the modeling.

**Another useful future extension could produce a General Equilibrium Search Model like the one developed by Hanming and Shepard (2019), but this will rely on future data availability.** Hamming and Shepard have labor supply and demand information and employer provided health insurance. In the present exercise we did not have firms’ information. Our estimated labor market parameters did not allow us to ascertain if the values found were coming from less labor market productivity or from employer discrimination against Roma males or females. Considering this limitation, in the policy experiments we one increased male and female labor parameters to simulate if there is a reduction in discrimination, or if Roma wives’ productivity increases over Roma husbands. We then calculate spouses’ optimal time allocation, labor supply, and wages for these scenarios.

**The presence of any source of nonlabor income changes the marginal utility of labor income against leisure and home production; thus, the behavior of couples with this income might differ significantly from couples without it.** In their analysis, Flabbi and Mabli (2018) include the effects of two levels of nonlabor income (or the absence of it) for U.S. couples’ labor decisions. Even in a labor market closer to Roma conditions, labor and nonlabor income of other household members is an important factor in determining female labor participation (Hafez and Ahmad 2002; Andres et al. 2017).

**Health status may also be highly correlated to employment status and labor force participation.** The Roma are often not able to invest in their health due to lack of access to medical care. In all countries, the prevalence of self-reported unmet need for medical care is high among the marginalized Roma, ranging from 16 percent in North Macedonia to as high as 36 percent in Albania. Self-perceived health is also lower among the Roma than the neighboring non-Roma, possibly indicating lower objective health outcomes among the marginalized Roma.<sup>38</sup> Health status is a condition that changes

> 38 Subjective health measures cannot be constructed using the 2017 RRS.

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