Research
Publications
"Mothers at Work: How Mandating a Short Maternity Leave Affects Work and Fertility", with Esther Mirjam Girsberger, Kalaivani Karunanethy & Rafael Lalive. Published in Labour Economics, 2023.
Coverage: The Economist
"Higher Education Financing and the Educational Aspirations of Teenagers and their Parents", with Dan Anderberg, Arnaud Chevalier, Melanie Luhrmann & Ronni Pavan. Published in Economics of Education Review (2021).
"Unilateral Divorce for Women and Labour Supply in the Middle East and North Africa: The Effect of Khul Reform", with Anna Sjogren. Published in Feminist Economics (2014)
Working Papers
"Female Employment, Marriage, and Childcare".
Childcare and women's employment decisions are intimately linked. I develop a dynamic model designed to analyse the effects of childcare subsidies on labour supply, fertility, marriage, and childcare decisions in a collective setting. In the model, children are a household good, produced by both parental time and time in childcare. Couples cannot commit to insure one another against the lower wages and lower consumption associated with spending time with a child. I estimate the model using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the United States to evaluate the impact of childcare subsidy programmes on various life-cycle outcomes of women and men. Offering a 10 percent childcare subsidy expands the labour supply of single women from lower-education backgrounds while married women, and higher-educated single women, respond much less. Finally, I show that there are large increases in childcare take-up associated with childcare subsidies, which improves the quality of children as a household good. This increases gains from marriage and results in an increase in the married fraction of the sample.
Contribution to Books:
Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities, Routledge (2017), edited by Ebru Kongar, Jennifer C. Olmsted, Elora Shehabuddin