Working Papers

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.

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 1988s to 2015 can be attributed to changes in the causal effect of college.

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.

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.

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.

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.