Working Papers & Publications

The gender wage gap and the child penalty [JMP]

Child penalties account for most of the remaining gender inequality in the labor market. Yet, we still do not know much about why they remain so large and persistent. I start by documenting a novel fact, which is the presence of heterogeneity in child penalties in the US by measures of intra-household comparative advantage. Then, I investigate the effect of the closing of the gender wage gap on employment penalties for mothers over the years 1980-2010. To do so, I leverage gender differences in occupational choices and combine gender-specific local labor market shocks with pseudo-event studies around childbirth. I find evidence of a greater fall in child penalties in local labor markets with a faster convergence in the wage rate of women and men. I explore possible mechanisms and find evidence of an increase in education of women, relative to men, delayed childbirth, and suggestive evidence of a shift in gender norms.

Child Penalties and Parental Role Models: Classroom Exposure Effects with H. Kleven and E. Patacchini. NBER Working Paper
Featured in Cornell Chronicle

This paper investigates whether the effects of children on the labor market outcomes of women relative to men — child penalties — are shaped by the work behavior of peers’ parents during adolescence. Leveraging quasi-random variation in the fraction of peers with working parents across cohorts within schools, we find that greater exposure to working mothers during adolescence substantially reduces the child penalty in employment later in life. Conversely, we find that greater exposure to working fathers increases the penalty. Our findings suggest that parental role models during adolescence are critical for shaping child-related gender gaps in the labor market.

Innovations and Challenges in Assessing the Effects of Immigrant Legal Status with M. Hall, S.Gleeson. Accepted, Annual Review of Sociology, November 2024

Immigrant legal status is a defining factor in the socio-economic trajectories of millions of individuals and families in the U.S. Unauthorized immigrants, in particular, face a complex set of challenges that influence nearly every aspect of their lives, from access to education and healthcare to labor market opportunities and community integration. Legal status affects not only those who lack documentation but also their children and extended family members, creating intergenerational patterns of disadvantage that shape social mobility and economic outcomes. Scholars have increasingly examined how legal precarity leads to economic marginalization, social exclusion, and psychological stress, as well as how legal protections can mitigate these adverse effects. This review delves into the trends and patterns of unauthorized immigration in the U.S., explores the methodologies used to measure unauthorized populations, and examines the economic, social, and intergenerational impacts of legal status. Understanding these dynamics is crucial to developing policies that address the deep-rooted inequalities faced by unauthorized migrants and their families.

Origin Ties and Destination Experiences: Quantifying Online Transnationalism among U.S. Immigrant Groups with L. Zhao, M. Hall. Submitted October 2024

While scholars have long acknowledged the importance of understanding immigrants’ connections to their countries of origin, large-scale, cross-group analyses remain limited. This research note addresses this gap by introducing a novel measure of online transnationalism, which captures digital ties between 41 U.S. immigrant groups and their homelands - representing 75\% of the U.S. adult immigrant population. Our work offers the first comprehensive analysis of how online transnationalism varies both across immigrant groups and across destination contexts. Findings demonstrate that immigrant groups with higher online transnationalism tend to be less established and more recent arrivals. At the same time, we do not find evidence that increased connectivity is associated with worse economic outcomes.

Work in Progress

Occupational segregation, gender and career choices with A. Cools, E. Patacchini and N. Szembrot

In this paper, we investigate how exposure to gendered labor market behaviors during childhood and adolescence influences long-term educational and occupational outcomes. By linking adult outcomes from the American Community Survey (2005–2021) to data from the 2000 and 2010 Decennial Censuses, we reconstruct family of origin characteristics and childhood locations for each individual in our sample. Using residential addresses, we construct measures of exposure to occupational segregation by gender at the census tract level and examine how growing up in more occupationally segregated neighborhoods predicts occupational choices in adulthood. To isolate the effect of exposure, we control for a broad set of observable characteristics and exploit variation in occupational segregation across census tracts within counties of origin. We also control for county of residence in adulthood. Our findings indicate that girls who were more exposed to women working in stereotypically female occupations during adolescence are more likely to enter female-dominated occupations as adults. Similarly, boys with lower exposure to men working in traditionally male occupations tend to choose occupations with a higher share of women. We are currently extending our analysis to assess the impact of exposure to specific occupations, in order to assess whether our findings are driven by adherence to gender norms or the acquisition of job-specific skills.

Event studies: choice of reference period with D. Miller

In almost all current empirical practice, event study coefficients are estimated relative to the -1 period. This is accomplished by dropping the -1 event time dummy variable from the model. In this paper we propose an alternative normalization based on a wider pre-event reference period. We demonstrate that expanding the reference period beyond the conventional -1 event time can substantially improve statistical precision, with a reduction in standard errors. This approach offers greater scope for averaging pre-treatment periods, resulting in a more reliable counterfactual baseline. However, we also find that under certain data structures—specifically those with imbalanced event timing—expanding the reference period may lead to higher standard errors. These findings underscore the importance of tailoring normalization choices to the data structure, and we propose a novel method, based on Greene and Seaks (1991), to identify the optimal reference period without introducing p-hacking risks.

Local governors as tax enforcers with C. Lacava

This paper evaluates the impact of the “Certified Warnings Program,” a tax enforcement initiative in Italy that allowed municipalities to collaborate with the national tax authority in detecting tax evasion. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that municipalities adopting the program experienced a significant increase in declared taxable income. Additionally, we observe a 8.9pp higher re-election probability for mayors who implemented the program during their first term, indicating substantial political benefits. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of localized tax enforcement in enhancing compliance and its potential as a political strategy.

Like Mothers, like daughters? The impact of mothers’ work experience on daughters’ aspirations with N. Jha, M. Welch. R. Suryanarayana

This work examines the influence of mothers’ employment on high-school test scores and self-reported math and science ability of adolescent girls in the United States. We leverage geographical variation in the sudden increase in female labor force participation during World War II, particularly in unconventional manufacturing jobs, as a historical shift in societal attitudes towards women working in the United States. To instrument for mothers’ employment, we use a set of complementary identification strategies based on differences in mobilization rates, casualty rates, wartime production conversion, and pre-war industry composition. Our outcomes are derived from the Project Talent database, a unique cohort panel dataset that captures career choice and subject-based interest scores for the 1942-1946 cohorts of high-school students.