Research

Working Papers:

Spousal Insurance, Precautionary Labor Supply, and the Business Cycle (submitted)

I document that married women are less likely to leave the labor force and are more attached to employment in recessions. Using a two-person household incomplete assets markets model with labor market frictions, I show that married women exhibit precautionary labor supply in response to the higher threat of job loss experienced by their husband in recessions. Quantitative analysis shows that married women's precautionary labor supply behavior is an important mechanism of intra-household risk sharing and accounts for 30% of married women's low cyclicality of employment. Furthermore, I show that spousal insurance reduces consumption volatility in married households by 30% over the business cycle.

Cyclicality of Hours Worked by Married Women and Spousal Insurance (submitted)

In contrast to most macroeconomic models which predict strong procyclical hours, I document that married women’s hours are significantly less cyclical than hours worked by married men and singles. I analyze macro evidence on hours and employment volatility as well as flow rates and show that procyclical E-to-N transition rates imply countercyclical attachment to employment for married women. Using micro-level data, I explore sources for married women’s countercyclical employment attachment and find that it is associated with higher actual and risk of job loss for the husband which indicates a spousal insurance motive.

From Trend to Cycle: the Changing Careers of Married Women and Business Cycle Risk (joint with Amanda Michaud)

The rise in hours and employment of married women has been driven by a rise of "career women" with highly persistent full-time participation. We derive implications of this secular change for the cyclically aggregate labor using a unified theory where increases in the returns to tenure and decreasing child care costs change women's choice of career paths. We find that, while the cyclicality of hours varies greatly across career types, the changing composition of careers and families nets little change in the cyclicality of aggregate hours, but redistributes the cyclical risk across household types. We explore implications for households' welfare, risk sharing, and savings, by cohort and for each recessionary episode over the computed transition from 1975-2015.

Works in Progress:

Household Insurance in a Pandemic (joint with Amanda Michaud)

Living in a married household typically mitigates income risk. Is this true during a pandemic? On the one hand, the presence of two potential earners reduces the household income risk associated with a cut in hours, job loss, or a stay at home order. On the other, married couples are more likely to have children to care for during a stay at home order and larger households are more likely to have a member with a health condition that makes them vulnerable to severe illness if they contract the virus. Using a structural model of labor supply, we measure how these factors affect the welfare outcomes of different household types and the aggregate dynamics of employment in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.