**As expected, when the structural parameters are the same for males and females, there are no differences in any of the mentioned dimensions.** In that scenario, labor participation of Roma is almost zero for spouses without children, and both husbands and wives enter the labor market when having children. This happens because males’ leisure weight is reduced, home production weight augments, but income weight also augments. Therefore, spouses with lower home production productivity will enter the labor market, given the increasing need for labor income.

**The experiments that equalize wives’ labor demand parameters to the husbands’ values increase wives’ labor participation, reduce husbands’ participation, relative to the benchmark; and mean home production time remains altered for husbands, but increased for wives in all labor market states.** This means that wives of all productive types are entering the labor market, which raises average home production time by wives. This applies to the policies that equat <mark>e the expected months to receive a job offer or an increase in expected months to receive a laid-off shock and equal pay policies between Roma spouses.</mark>

**In particular, equalizing wages is the policy that induces more wives to join the labor market and husbands to withdraw from it.** This outcome signals that the wage gap is the dimension that deters the greatest number of Roma wives from joining the labor market.

**The experiment that equates the wives home production distribution with the husbands’ values would increase wives’ participation by 10 percentage points; husbands’ nonparticipation only changes when the household has children, and it is the only policy that equates home work time.**

**When the leisure preferences parameters or the search cost are the same between genders, no wives enter the labor market.** When we equalize these parameters between husbands and wives, the wives’ leisure now has more weight in household utility and income is less valued. Moreover, as the labor market is disadvantaged for wives relative to husbands, the result of the household optimization is that both spouses only enjoy leisure and home production in the nonparticipation state.

# **8. Limitations and Future Research**

**This paper constructs and estimates a structural model to understand gender differentials in the labor market among marginalized Roma** . The model is based on the household search model of Guler, Guvenen and Violante (GGV) (2012), and extended to allow for (i) full-time versus part-time work, (ii) time inputs into home production, and (iii) household utility defined over labor income, home production and leisure. The model is estimated using data from the Regional Roma survey, which was collected in six Western Balkans countries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a model with these features has been used to study gender dynamics among the Roma population. However, many challenges remain to fully comprehend the behavior of the Roma population in the labor market.

**First, because of cultural reasons but also due to lack of economic resources, extended Roma families in many cases live together and share economic and time resources.** Therefore, exploring how extended families make choices in the labor market seems promising in the Roma population context; the current specification has 16 possible couples’ labor market states, multiplied by husband’s

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