Research
Social Distance Policies in ECON EPI Networks
HELP! Slides (May 8th)
NBER SI Aging Slides (July 16th)
The End of the American Dream? Inequality and Segregation in US Cities
Video presentation Minneapolis Fed
Germs, Social Networks and Growth
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
When societies form their social institutions, they do so, in part, to protect themselves from the spread of disease. But such social structures may inhibit the diffusion of new technologies and restrain economic development.
The Geography of the Great Recession
NBER Working Paper w18447 (2012)
This paper documents, using county level data, some geographical features of the US business cycle over the past 30 years, with particular focus on the Great Recession. It shows that county level unemployment rates are spatially dispersed and spatially correlated, and documents how these characteristics evolve during recessions.
Nature or Nurture? Learning and the Geography of Female Labor Force Participation
Econometrica, July 2011
The increase in female labor force participation and its geographic pattern was driven partly by the diffusion of information about the effects of maternal employment on childhood development.
Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs,Work, and Fertility
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2009
We study culture by examining the work and fertility behavior of second-generation American women. Culture is proxied with past female labor force participation and total fertility rates from the woman’s country of ancestry. We show that the cultural proxies have positive significant explanatory power even after controlling for education and spousal characteristics, and we demonstrate that the results are unlikely to be explained by unobserved human capital.
Family: The Role of Culture and Family Experience
Journal of European Economic Association, 2006
This paper attempts to disentangle the direct effects of experience from those of culture in determining fertility. We use the GSS to examine the fertility of women born in the US but from different ethnic backgrounds. We take lagged values of the total fertility rate in the woman’s country of ancestry as the cultural proxy and use the woman’s number of siblings to capture her direct family experience. We find that both variables are significant determinants of fertility, even after controlling for several individual and family-level characteristics.
Mothers and Sons: Preference Formation and Female Labor Force Dynamics
The Quarterly Journal of Economics , 2004
This paper argues that the growing presence of a new type of man–one brought up in a family in which the mother worked–has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time. We present cross-sectional evidence showing that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work. We use variation in the importance of WWII as a shock to women’s labor force participation–as proxied by variation in the male draft rate across US states–to provide evidence in support of the intergenerational consequences of our propagation mechanism.