Labor Supply, Flexible Hours and Real Estate Agents

Real estate agents have flexibility in choosing hours and employers. These responses are tested with a five‐equation recursive model. Agents choose between full‐ and part‐time work. The conditional wage measures productivity adjusted for self‐selection to each status. Hours worked in each status dep...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inReal estate economics Vol. 37; no. 4; pp. 747 - 767
Main Authors Benjamin, John D., Chinloy, Peter, Winkler, Daniel T.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Malden, USA Blackwell Publishing Inc 01.12.2009
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Subjects
Earnings
Economic models
Elasticity
Flexible hours
Labor supply
Productivity
Real estate agents & brokers
Studies
Working hours
United States > US
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Summary:Real estate agents have flexibility in choosing hours and employers. These responses are tested with a five‐equation recursive model. Agents choose between full‐ and part‐time work. The conditional wage measures productivity adjusted for self‐selection to each status. Hours worked in each status depend on the fitted after‐tax wage and household income, yielding flexible supply elasticities. Using a 2005 survey of 8,450 U.S. real estate agents, a year of experience raises the full‐time hourly wage by 2.5%. Conditional hours worked decline by 0.6%, implying an earnings return of 1.9% per year of experience. The labor supply elasticity for full‐time agents is 0.21; it is almost zero for part timers.
Bibliography:istex:6DFF2DB3DFB2B228098E8BACADBF87F237701F44
ark:/67375/WNG-F767MXPW-Z
ArticleID:REEC262
ISSN:1080-8620
1540-6229
DOI:10.1111/j.1540-6229.2009.00262.x