Research by Topic

This paper examines the labor market returns to delaying pregnancy, studying how the timing of first birth affects women's career outcomes. Using administrative data, we identify the causal effects of pregnancy timing on wages, employment, and career progression, contributing to our understanding of the motherhood penalty and gender wage gap.

This paper studies the complementarities between multi-dimensional abilities, high school investments, and college investments in wages. Using a novel administrative data set from Sweden, the analysis accounts for a rich set of observables; latent cognitive, grit, and interpersonal abilities; high school specialization in vocational, academic, and STEM tracks; and college major choices. We find that investing in more challenging tracks in high school increases college enrollment and graduation, but not necessarily wages. For students who do not pursue medicine or engineering in college, specializing in STEM in high school leads to slightly lower wages compared to a more balanced academic track.

This paper investigates the dynamics of behavioral changes during a crisis. We study this in the context of the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, where behavioral responses were important in mitigating the costs of the pandemic. To identify behavioral responses to unanticipated and transient health risk shocks, we combine high-frequency cellphone mobility data with detailed incidence data in Germany. Using an event-study design on local outbreaks, we find that county-level mobility immediately and significantly decreased by about 2.5% in response to an outbreak independent of non-pharmaceutical interventions. We also find that the reproduction rate decreased by about 17% in response to a local outbreak.

This paper examines the gender wage gap through the lens of skills, sorting, and returns. We decompose the gender wage gap into components attributable to differences in skill endowments, sorting across occupations, and differential returns to skills. Our findings reveal that while skill differences explain a portion of the gap, sorting patterns and differential returns play substantial roles in understanding gender wage disparities.

This paper develops a sufficient statistics approach for estimating the role of search frictions in wage dispersion and lifecycle wage growth. We show how the wage dynamics of displaced workers are directly informative of both for a large class of search models. Specifically, the correlation between pre- and post-displacement wages is informative of frictional wage dispersion. Furthermore, the fraction of displaced workers who suffer a wage loss is informative of frictional wage growth and job-to-job mobility, independent of the job-offer distribution and other labor-market parameters. Applying our methodology to US data, we find that search frictions account for less than 20 percent of wage dispersion. In addition, we estimate that between 40 to 80 percent of workers experience no frictional wage growth during an employment spell.

We document gender differences in the booking of business air travel among similar workers within a firm. Women pay consistently less per ticket than men after accounting for a large set of covariates. A large proportion of the lower fares paid are explained by women booking earlier. We find that gender differences increase with age but find no deviation from this trend during the childbearing years. We also find that country-level gender differences in reciprocity are associated with the documented gender differences. The documented gender differences have important monetary implications for firms and suggest an important role for workers' morale.

Leveraging data from Sweden and Chicago, we study the educational pipeline for STEM and economics majors to better understand the determinants of the gender gap, and when these determinants arise. We present three findings. First, females are less likely to select STEM courses in high school, despite equal or better preparation. Second, there are important gender differences in preferences and beliefs, even conditional on ability. Third, early differences in preferences and beliefs explain more of the gaps in high school sorting than other candidate variables. High school sorting then explains a large portion of the gender difference in college majors.

This paper uses networks to study price dispersion in seller-buyer markets where buyers with unit demand interact with multiple, but not all, sellers; and buyers and sellers compete on prices after they meet. The central finding of this paper is that price dispersion is determined by the structure of the network. First, for any given network we characterize the pairwise stable matchings and the prices that support them. Second, we characterize the set of all graphs where price dispersion is precluded. Third, we use a theorem from Frieze (1985) to show that the graphs where price dispersion is precluded arise asymptotically with probability one in random Poisson networks, even as the probability of each individual link goes to zero.

This paper defines and estimates returns to education for earnings, health, and smoking using a dynamic model of educational choice. We synthesize approaches in the structural dynamic discrete choice literature with approaches used in the reduced form treatment effect literature. We offer an empirically robust middle ground between the two approaches to estimate economically interpretable and policy-relevant treatment effects that recognize the dynamic nature of schooling decisions. Ability bias is a major component of observed educational differentials for most outcomes we study. Both cognitive and non-cognitive abilities play important roles in explaining observed differences in earnings, health, and smoking across all education levels.

This paper analyzes the non-market benefits of education and ability. Using a dynamic model of educational choice we estimate returns to education that account for selection bias and sorting on gains. We investigate a range of non-market outcomes including incarceration, mental health, voter participation, trust, and participation in welfare. We find distinct patterns of returns that depend on the levels of schooling and ability. Unlike the monetary benefits of education, the benefits to education for many non-market outcomes are greater for low-ability persons. College graduation decreases welfare use, lowers depression, and raises self-esteem more for less-able individuals.

This paper develops robust models for estimating and interpreting treatment effects arising from both ordered and unordered multi-stage decision problems. Identification is secured through instrumental variables and/or conditional independence (matching) assumptions. We decompose treatment effects into direct effects and continuation values associated with moving to the next stage of a decision problem. Using our framework, we decompose the IV estimator, showing that IV generally does not estimate economically interpretable or policy-relevant parameters in prototypical dynamic discrete choice models, unless policy variables are instruments.

We show that when frictions are present, the Peters and Severinov (2006) bidding rule is no longer efficient nor a PBE of the PS game.

The gap in wages between workers with and without a college degree has widened substantially since 1980. This change in observed wage patterns could have multiple explanations, including changes in the individual returns to college training, changes in the composition of workers at each schooling level, and changes in the returns to pre-schooling skill endowments. We estimate a robust dynamic model of educational choices and wages that incorporates all three possibilities. We find that most of the growth in the observed college premium from the late 1980s to 2015 can be attributed to changes in the causal effect of college.

Can surveys affect human capital investments? This paper examines whether individual education choices and outcomes are affected by a survey posing questions related to expectations and forward-looking behavior. We have administrative data for the whole Swedish population to which an extensive education survey was administered to randomly drawn samples of 3rd graders. The causal effect of the survey on both short- and long-term outcomes is generally not significantly different from zero. We find, however, that being surveyed increases educational attainment and job stability in the early career for those with low parental education.

Informed by new measurements of labor market dynamics, I develop and estimate an equilibrium search model of worker mobility. I describe new facts about wage dynamics across involuntary unemployment spells in Denmark. I construct a model combining search and human capital accumulation. Workers accumulate skills via learning-by-doing with decreasing returns for a given job. Workers must either be promoted or find a job at a new firm to continue learning new skills. The estimates show that the job-ladder model explains less than 10% of worker mobility seen in the data.

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical analysis of the impact of attending a child day care center on early childhood development (ECD) in Chile. The potential endogeneity associated with the parental decision of sending children to day care centers is addressed, and unobserved heterogeneity is interpreted as latent abilities. The results suggest that enrollment in child care centers seems to boost cognitive development among children older than two.

Does the college major premium reflect returns to prior abilities or college education? We decompose the college major premium into labor market returns to multidimensional abilities (grit, interpersonal, and cognitive) and skills learned in college. We find that sorting on abilities accounts for 10-50% of the college major premium. We document that 40% of students who enter STEM degrees change major or drop out.