Research

Occupation Gender Segregation: Empirical Evidence from a Matching Model with Transfers

(Job Market Paper) (Download)

I examine whether women remain concentrated in certain occupations because workers prefer to work with their own gender. I build a structural model in which workers maximize utility over occupation, wage, and the gender composition of their occupation, and firms maximize profit over the gender and wages of their employees. Using a Bartik instrumental variables strategy, I find that women strongly prefer to enter female-dominated occupations, but men show no evidence of gender preference. Given these estimates, equilibrium simulations indicate that equal pay for equal work laws could in fact increase segregation by preventing employers from compensating for gender preference.

Is There Still Son Preference in the United States? (with Francine D. Blau, Lawrence M. Kahn, Peter Brummund, and Jason Cook).

Forthcoming at the Journal of Population Economics (Link)

NBER Working Paper No. 23816 (Download)

Vox article (Link)

In this paper, we use 2008–2013 American Community Survey data to update and further probe evidence on son preference in the USA. In light of the substantial increase in immigration, we examine this question separately for natives and immigrants. Dahl and Moretti (Review of Economic Studies 75, 1085-1120, 2008) found earlier evidence consistent with son preference in that having a female first child raised fertility and increased the probability that the family was living without a father. We find that for our more recent period, having a female first child still raises the likelihood of living without a father, but is instead associated with lower fertility, particularly for natives. Thus, by the 2008–2013 period, any apparent son preference in fertility decisions appears to have been outweighed by factors such as cost concerns in raising girls or increased female bargaining power. In contrast, some evidence for son preference in fertility persists among immigrants. Immigrant families that have a female first child have significantly higher fertility and are more likely to be living without a father (though not significantly so). Further, gender inequity in source countries is associated with son preference in fertility among immigrants. For both first- and second-generation immigrants, the impact of a female first-born child on fertility is more pronounced for immigrants from source countries with less gender equity. Finally, we find no evidence of sex selection for the general population of natives and immigrants, suggesting that it does not provide an alternative mechanism to account for the disappearance of a positive fertility effect for natives.

Intrahousehold Interaction and Married Family Labor Supply (Download)

Little is known about the role of household decision-making in the dramatic increase in labor supply of married women in the U.S. over the past half-century. In this paper, I use a bivariate probit and a Nash best-response game to look for changes in how married households supply labor over time in Census and PSID data. Consistent with past literature, I find in general that husbands prefer a household where one spouse specializes in home production and the other in market work, while wives prefer either both spouses work or both stay at home. Identification of these asymmetric effects comes from exclusion restrictions and sufficient variation in the characteristics of husbands and wives that push them to work in the market or at home. Next, I allow the interaction between spouses to depend on whether there are children in the home. I find that children increase complementarity of labor supply decisions for men and substitutability for women, but this has reversed over time for men. Lastly, I look at variation by spouse's labor income. Higher income husbands decrease the return to working for wives, but higher earning wives increase the return for husbands, consistent with a preference against being out-earned.