This paper examines the relationship between the prevalence of overwork and skilled women's labor force participation and occupational choice. Using country-level variation, we find a negative relationship between the share of males working 50+ hours a week and the LFP of young married women, with the correlation being much smaller for single women and older married women. Using a panel of occupations across countries, we find that overwork in an occupation is negatively correlated with the share of married women working in that occupation. This finding is robust to controlling for the occupational distribution of groups with fewer household responsibilities.

It is well established that consumption is “hump” shaped over an individual's lifecycle, peaking in middle age and then declining in the years that follow. Prior research has documented that consumption declines at retirement, which is inconsistent with the standard lifecycle model with consumption smoothing. Using a unique dataset with detailed administrative records of credit and debit card transactions, we show the hump shaped lifecycle consumption pattern as documented in the literature. Additionally, we show compositional changes in consumption expenditures across individuals in the years surrounding retirement confirming the results of Aguiar and Hurst (2005, 2013).