Research

Forthcoming and Published Articles:


In this paper we review the recent literature on the impact of maternity leave and paternity leave in high-income countries. The literature on parental leave has proliferated during the past two decades. The increased number of studies on the topic has brought forth some consistent findings. First, the introduction of short maternity leave is beneficial for both maternal and child health and for mothers’ labor market outcomes. Second, there appear to be negligible benefits from a leave extending beyond 6 months in terms of health outcomes and children’s long-term outcomes. Furthermore, longer leaves have little, or even adverse, influence on mothers’ labor market outcomes. However, evidence suggests that there may be underlying heterogeneous effects from extended leave among different socioeconomic groups. The literature on the effect of earmarked paternity leave indicates that these policies are effective in increasing fathers’ leave-taking and involvement in child care. However, the evidence on the influence of paternity leave on gender equality in the labor market remains scarce and is somewhat mixed. Finally, recent studies that focus on the effect of parental leave policies for firms find that in general, firms are able to compensate for lost labor when their employees go on leave. However, if firms face constraints when replacing employees, it could negatively influence their performance.


We investigate the effect of a law reform in Iceland that earmarked one third of the total parental leave to fathers on marital stability. This change was implemented in stages, and parents who had a child in 2001 were given the option to add one month of parental leave to the allotted six months but only if the additional month was used by the father. Fathers of children born before January 1, 2001 had no such separate or independent right to parental leave. The reform created substantial economic incentives for fathers to be more involved in caring for their children during their first months of life, and the take-up rate in the first year was 82.4%. We compare the marital stability of couples who had children just before and just after the reform and find that parents who are entitled to paternity leave are less likely to divorce during the first ten years of their child’s life, the time in a relationship when the probability of a divorce is the highest. 

In the 1970s, the proportion of male college freshmen who planned to become teachers dropped from 15% to 3%, and that of female freshman from 45% to 12%. In this paper, I use nationally representative survey data on the career plans of college freshmen to look at the roles played by increased access to fertility controls and the unionization of the teaching sector, in the decline in the popularity of the teaching sector during this period. I find that the overall impact of these factors on men was small and insignificant, whereas early legal access to contraceptives increased women’s likelihood of planning to become teachers. Looking at the actual career outcomes of the same cohorts in the census data, I find that access to the pill had a negative impact on the share of men in teaching and positive impact on the share of women. I use information on high school grades and college selectivity in the freshmen surveys to separate students by academic ability in the analysis. I find that unionization had a negative impact on plans to become teachers among high-ability men and low-ability women. Increased access to the pill had a negative impact on the share of low-ability men who planned to teach and a positive impact on the share among low- and medium-ability women. 

This study examines gender discrimination and the possibility that education is more important for signaling ability among women than men. As social networks tend to run along gender lines and managers in the labor market are predominantly male, it may be more difficult for women to signal their ability without college credentials. The Lang and Manove (2011) model of racial discrimination and educational sorting is applied to examine the gender gap in schooling attainment. The model is empirically estimated for whites, blacks and Hispanics separately, where the results among whites are consistent with education being more valuable to women due to signaling. For 90% of the whites in the sample women choose a higher level of education given their ability than men. Women on average obtain 0.5 - 0.7 extra years of schooling compared to men with the same ability score. 

This paper studies the heterogeneous effects of the birth control pill and abortion rights on young people’s career plans. In particular, these effects are allowed to vary by sex, race, religion, and, importantly, by level of academic ability. Using annual surveys of over two million college freshmen from 1968 to 1976, I find that the pill mainly affected high ability women, by shifting their plans toward occupations with higher wages and higher male ratios. Abortion rights, in contrast, were mainly shown to affect women in the low ability group, with their plans shifting towards careers associated with lower income and lower prestige scores. My findings also suggest that the career plans of black males were positively affected by both increased access to the pill and abortions.


Submitted Work and Working Papers:


This paper estimates the impact of having a child with a severe disability on parents’ trajectory of earnings, labor force participation and asset accumulation as well as subsequent fertility and partner separation using data from Denmark. We construct a database of the universe of births (over 600,000) in Denmark in 1994-2005 that links together several administrative registers including a population register, health records and data from tax authorities and employers. The main estimates are based on a “grandparent fixed effects” strategy, comparing affected families to families of one of the parents siblings, combined with adjustments for a rich set of observables. We find that affected families (on first birth) have 13% fewer subsequent children and earn on average 12% less 10 years after birth. Mothers earnings rise on average in the years after birth compared to comparison families due to a lower fertility rate but drop below the comparison group 5 years after birth. Fathers earnings are negatively impacted for all years after birth. We also find that partner separations are lower in affected families and that over time there is greater asset accumulation in these families. 

How do parents contend with threats to the health and survival of their children? Can the social safety net mitigate negative economic effects through transfers to affected families? We study these questions by combining the universe of cancer diagnoses among Danish children with register data for affected and matched unaffected families. Parental income declines substantially for 3-4 years following a child’s cancer diagnosis. Fathers’ incomes recover fully, but mothers’ incomes remain 3% lower 12 years after diagnosis. Both parents substantially increase use of mental health care services. Fertility increases, particularly among families in which the child did not survive the cancer. Using variation in the generosity of targeted safety net transfers to affected families, we show that such transfers play a crucial role in smoothing income for these households and, importantly, do not generate work disincentive effects.

In Progress: