Selected Work in Progress
Family and Gender
Gender wage gap and the child penalty [JMP]
Child penalties account for most of the remaining gender inequality in the labor market. However, very little is known about why child penalties remain so large and gendered. In this work 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, and I explore possible mechanisms.
Occupational segregation, gender and career choices with A. Cools, E. Patacchini and N. Szembrot
In this paper we analyze how exposure to labor market behaviors of men and women during childhood and adolescence affects long-run educational and occupational choices. We link adult outcomes observed in the American Community Survey 2005-2021 to the 2000 and 2010 Decennial Census to obtain information on family characteristics and location during childhood. We utilize several empirical approaches: first, we rely on variation in exposure to occupational segregation within small geographic areas (for instance, census blocks within census tracts). Second, we apply a mover-design at the sub-state geographic level to compare individuals who work in the same labor market as adults, but were exposed to different levels of occupational segregation during adolescence. Finally, we compute a year-by-year measure of exposure to occupational segregation in the spirit of Chetty et al (2018) and do a within-siblings comparison. Our preliminary results suggest that girls more exposed to women working in stereotypically gendered occupations during adolescence are more likely to end up in a female-dominated occupation.
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.
Peers’ parents and child penalty in employment with H. Kleven and E. Patacchini
Immigration
The local context of being undocumented: variation in economic outcomes for unauthorized workers across US labor markets with M. Hall
This paper uncovers variation across labor markets in the economic well-being of unauthorized workers. To do so, we leverage restricted data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) panels between 1996 and 2023 that includes information sufficient to impute the immigration status of immigrant workers and contains identifiers for where they live and work. We combine these data with information on the demographic and economic conditions of labor markets, including the size of the unauthorized immigrant population, the historical settlement of immigrants, and the industrial composition of the workforce. We focus our attention on the wage and occupational trajectories of immigrant workers, using a series of descriptive demographic tools to explore variation in wage penalties across U.S. labor markets, and growth-curve techniques to consider how these differences can be explained by features of labor markets hypothesized to alter the exchange of legality to employers.
Other work
Local governors as tax enforcers with C. Lacava
Event studies: choice of reference period with D. Miller