The static structural discrete choice labor supply model continues to be a workhorse in the process of policy-making, extensively used by policy-makers to predict labor supply effects of changes in the personal income tax system. A widely used alternative to obtain estimates of individual tax responsiveness is to exploit the diversity of tax treatment generated by a tax reform to recover tax induced outcome differences in data. Response estimates obtained from analysis of tax reforms are less useful for describing effects of prospective policies, but represent an underexploited source of information for out-of-sample validation of labor supply models. The present study describes how estimates of responses in working hours and income, generated from a tax reform, can be used to validate a discrete choice labor supply model; thus, bringing together and providing guidance to how results of two main avenues of obtaining estimates of tax responsiveness can be compared and interpreted. We find that the discrete choice model used by Norwegian policy-makers performs well as measured by this type of validation.

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Norwegian parents of preschool children base their care choices on a completely different choice set from their predecessor. Now there is essentially only one type of nonparental carecenter-based careand on the parental side fathers take a more pivotal role in early childhood care. In the present paper we develop and estimate a joint labor supply and child care choice model that takes account of these new characteristics, on the assumption that this model points to current and future modeling directions for several other economies too. Estimations suggest that the average wage elasticity for mothers is 0.25-0.30.

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Estimates of the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is conventionally obtained by "stacking" three-year overlapping differences in the estimation. In effect, this means that the ETI estimate is an average of first-, second-, and third-year effects. The present paper draws attention to this implication and suggests that if there is gradual adjustment the analyst should rather estimate the ETI by a dynamic panel data model. When using Norwegian income tax return data for wage earners over a 14-year period (1995−2008) in the estimation, an ETI estimate of 0.15 is obtained from the dynamic specification, compared to 0.11 for the conventional approach. Importantly, the conventional approach fails to render a long-term elasticity estimate by increasing the time span of each difference.