Research

"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)


"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.


Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities, Routledge (2017), edited by Ebru Kongar, Jennifer C. Olmsted, Elora Shehabuddin