Labor supply, flexible hours and real estate agents

Abstract

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. © 2009 American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.