females’ and males’ wage offers, job tenure, and job offer arrival rates; gender roles regarding leisure or home production and fertility patterns; or more generally, policies affecting overall Roma labor market conditions.

**Counterfactual experiments show that males and females do not react symmetrically to policy interventions, and that most labor gender gaps can be closed by providing wives the same labor market conditions as husbands.** All the policy experiments increase or reduce Roma husbands’ and wives’ parameter values. <mark>Focusing on husbands, increasing the frequency of receiving a job offer, decreasing the frequency of layoffs, and reducing the search cost are the policies that most increase the husbands’ labor participation. Focusing on wives, the policy that induces more wives to participate in the labor market is increasing Roma husbands’ and wives’ wages.</mark>

**Future extensions of the model could endogenize the fertility decision to reflect the impact of**

**labor market changes on the number of children** . Another useful extension could introduce the role that taxes and subsidies have on the spouses’ decisions. Moreover, because the Roma population in many cases live in extended families, including other household members’ labor market states and time decisions should adjust better the Roma labor market decisions. Sharing a dwelling with extended family could be a strategy for Roma households facing reduced labor opportunities. Currently, the RRS only applies the time usage module to a random household individual; to apply the modeling to extended families, time usage modules must collect data from all household members.

**Another useful future extension could make a General Equilibrium Search Model like the one developed by** **<mark>Hanming and Shephard (</mark> 2019), but this development will rely on future data availability.** Hanming and Shepard have labor supply and demand information and data from employer-provided health insurance. In this paper we do not have firms’ information; the estimated labor market parameters do not allow us to disentangle whether the values found are coming from reduced labor market productivity or from employer discrimination against Roma males or females. Given this limitation, in the policy experiments we will include only 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.

**This paper is organized as follows.** Section 2 describes the model. Section 3 describes the data. Section 4 discusses the identification of the model. Section 5 interprets and presents estimates from the model parameters and compares them to the Roma data. Section 6 presents policy experiments, and section 7 offers a gender decomposition of the time usage and labor market gaps. Section 8 discusses this paper’s limitations and proposes future research, and section 9 concludes.

# **2. Model**

**The model aims to explain married couples’ optimal decisions regarding participation in the labor market, which job offers to accept, wages, as well as time allocations** . It also describes how these allocations change when children are present. The model was developed in Salazar-Saenz (2020) and is closely related to Flabbi and Mabli (2018) and Choi (2018). Flabbi and Mabli (2018) modeled intensive and extensive margin decisions in the labor market but restricted the allocation of time between leisure and work. Choi (2018) introduced home production into spouses’ decisions to explain specialization in the labor market or chores, and how paternity leave impacts spouses’ decisions. This model was

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