Research

Published and Forthcoming Papers

In the press: Financial Times, Economist, Irish Times, Minneapolis Federal Reserve


In the press: The Guardian


In the press: Sky News, El Pais, Vox The Weeds (starts at 39:00), Liberation, Bustle, USC News, Mirage News, de Correspondent


In the press: World Bank



This article appeared as part of the United Nation's Roadmap for Promoting Women's Economic Empowerment


Working Papers

In the press: Washington Post Op-Ed

Domestic abuse encompasses a range of damaging behaviors beyond physical violence, including economic and emotional abuse. This paper provides the first evidence on the impact of cohabiting with an abusive partner on victim's economic outcomes. In so doing, we highlight the systematic role played by economic suppression and coercive control in such relationships. Using administrative data and a matched control event study design, along with a within-individual comparison of outcomes across relationships, we document three new facts. First, women who begin relationships with (eventually) physically abusive men suffer large and significant earnings and employment falls immediately upon cohabiting with the abusive partner, which translates into a total household income loss. Second, this decline in economic outcomes is non-monotonic in women's pre-cohabitation outside options. Third, abusive men impose economic costs on all their female partners, even those who do not report physical violence. To rationalize these findings, we develop a new dynamic model of abusive relationships where women do not perfectly observe their partner's type, and abusive men have an incentive to use coercive control to sabotage women's outside options and their ability to later exit the relationship. We show that this model is consistent with all three empirical facts. We harness the model's predictions to revisit some classic results on domestic violence and show that the relationship between domestic violence and women's outside options is crucially linked to breakup dynamics.


In the press: Fortune, Bloomberg, Apple, Jezebel, MSNBC Morning Joe, MSNBC, Economist, Forbes, and more

Following the June 24, 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court ruling, which overturned the federal right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, hundreds of employers publicly announced policies covering out-of-state employee travel for abortions and related care. Leveraging data from Indeed and Glassdoor, we first document that companies with more female and more Democratic-leaning employees and executives were more likely to announce these policies. We then examine the causal impact such announcements had on recruitment, job satisfaction, and pay by introducing a newmethodology to recover similar employers who did not make announcements using workers’ revealed preferences in job search. Difference-indifferences estimates reveal that for announcing companies: (i) vacancies received more job seeker interest, particularly in Democratic-leaning states and female-dominated jobs in states with "trigger" laws that outlawed abortion, (ii) satisfaction with management fell amongst existing employees, particularly in male-dominated jobs, and (iii) posted wages increased, especially for companies where employee sentiment declined. These results highlight the complicated trade-off employers face from engaging in sociopolitical dialogue, in particular how signals of company culture can help recruit new workers but alienate current ones.


In the press: Vox The Weeds (starts at 39:00), Liberation, Bustle, USC News, Mirage News

Children cause large reductions in earnings for mothers but not fathers, a stylized fact known as the “child penalty” that explains a substantial portion of remaining gender income gaps. We evaluate the impact of paternity leave, a policy intended to increase fathers’ time with their young children and potentially decrease the child penalty by making caregiving more equitable. Despite fathers overwhelmingly taking up this leave, we detect no impacts  on child penalties. We additionally nd no impact of paternity leave on the amount of leave fathers take for the next child, a good proxy for gender norms within couples. We highlight one possible explanation: fathers approach parental leave very dierently than mothers. Fathers are much more likely to take their paternity leave during summer holidays, when their children are already in formal care, and take more part-time leave than mothers. This tendency is stronger among fathers induced to take more leave by paternity leave quotas than  fathers in general, suggesting that quota-induced leave may not lead fathers to act as primary  caregivers. Consequently, we show descriptive evidence that child penalties are 10 percentage points smaller in families where fathers voluntarily take leave than in families where fathers are induced to take leave by paternity leave quotas.


Financial crimes are prolific and impose significant costs on societies. In this paper, we investigate whether prison sentences reduce financial crimes. Using random assignment of judges to identify causal impacts of prison sentences from 2000 to 2018 in Finland, we show that prison reduces defendant re-offending by 42.9 percentage points in the three years following the crime. We also find that a prison sentence reduces colleagues' propensity to commit financial crimes in the future, suggesting important spillover effects of harsher punishments. 


In the press: Financial Times

While many romantic relationships begin at work, intimate relationships between managers and subordinates have increasingly come under scrutiny. We use administrative data covering the universe of cohabiting couples in Finland from 1988-2018 to explore the career implications of dating and breaking up with a manager and spillovers on the wider workforce. Using a difference-in-differences across-couples research design we find that those in relationships with managers in their workplaces experience a 9% increase in their earnings compared to those in relationships with managers in different workplaces. Relationships between managers and subordinates last longer and both the manager and subordinate are more likely to remain in the same establishment. However, when a manager and subordinate break up, the subordinate is 13 percentage points more likely to drop out of employment. Last, we examine the spillovers of these relationships on the broader workforce. We document a 6 percentage point decrease in retention of other workers from these relationships, with significantly larger effects for smaller establishments and establishments where the subordinate had larger earnings gains. This result suggests that these relationships impose externalities on colleagues, including but not limited to exit from the firm.


Rape and sexual assault are common worldwide: one in twelve women across 28 EU countries have experienced a rape (European Institute for Gender Inequality, 2012). Yet there is no systematic evidence on how sexual violence affects women's economic outcomes. We harness detailed administrative data from Finland to provide new empirical facts on the economic effect of rape on victims and its spillovers. A third of police reports for rape involved victims younger than 21 years old at the time of the assault. We show that the age-25 employment and college completion rates of younger victims are 12.8 p.p and 10 p.p lower respectively than those of other young women with the same (pre-event) GPA and family background. For older victims, we use a matched difference-in-difference design to show that rape has a large and persistent economic impact on women: victims' employment falls by 7.8 percentage points and their labor market earnings decline 16.5% relative to observationally equivalent women in the five years following the assault. These results are robust to controlling for a variety of shocks preceding rape that could make it more likely for a woman to be victimized and independently suppress her economic outcomes. We also document important spillovers of these crimes to the victim's parents and peers. Mothers and fathers experience significant declines in their employment and female schoolmates experience a deterioration in mental health. Last, we show that higher clearance rates of rape cases mitigate the negative impacts on victims. Together, these results indicate that preventing and addressing sexual violence is a vital economic issue.  

Does graduating into a recession increase or decrease the transmission of inequality across generations? This paper examines this question through two innovations. First, given most people from low-income backgrounds do not attend university, we examine all education groups. We find large and persistent negative impacts of graduating into a recession for university graduates. In contrast, we only find short-run negative impacts for secondary and advanced-vocational graduates. Second, we examine the role of parental income and find little evidence wealthier parents mitigate these income losses for their graduating children; small significant differences by parental background only appear for secondary graduates. Together, these results suggest that bad economic conditions at graduation do not increase the persistence of incomes between parents and children. To understand these results, we write a simple model of differential human capital accumulation on-the-job, building on Deming and Noray (2020). We take the model to the data and show it is consistent with our main empirical results.


Thousands of migrants seek asylum in the U.S. annually. Upon entry, they encounter judges exhibiting large variability in their decisions, with a 20 percentage point within-court average gap in grant rates between the least versus most lenient judges from 2009-2015. We find asylum-seekers quasi-randomly assigned to less lenient immigration judges are more likely to be absent for their immigration hearings. We show this endogenous response to decision-maker leniency causes bias in second-stage estimates when using randomly assigned judges as instruments. Therefore, extreme variability in judicial decisions in immigration courts causes important distortions in behavior of those subject to such caprice.


Draft coming soon, currently available upon request.

In the press: The Weeds (starts at 38:28), Kellogg Insights


To produce output for a firm, coworkers often interact. This paper examines the possibility that as a by-product of these interactions, there are learning spillovers: coworkers learn general skills from each other that increase future productivity. In the first part of the paper I show that learning spillovers imply externalities in the return to human capital which firms may not internalize when there is asymmetric information. As a result, individuals may inefficiently invest in their own education. Next, I show that learning spillovers are empirically relevant. Using matched administrative data from Sweden and a combination of fixed effects and controls to address bias from worker sorting and firm heterogeneity, I find that increasing the average education of a given worker's coworkers by 10 percentage points increases that worker's wages in the following year by 0.3%, which is significant at the 1% level. The effect is persistent, decreases with age, and is higher for workers in occupations where they interact more regularly with their coworkers. 

In the press: LSE Business Review


Most criminal justice systems use a "ladder of punishments" that starts with less severe punishments and progress to more severe punishments according to crime severity and criminal history. Using random assignment to judges, we estimate causal impacts of three common punishments on the ladder-fines, probation, and prison-on defendants' criminal and labor market outcomes. We find that fines increase recidivism. However, this increase is concentrated among those committing less severe crimes. Probation decreases recidivism for those committing less severe crimes and first offenders. Neither fines nor probation affect earnings. Prison has a mixed impact, decreasing future charges but also decreasing earnings.