About Me

My research agenda is centered around understanding how social policies that provide paid leave and other family-friendly benefits affect men, women, and children. I am particularly interested in how these policies can be used to reduce gender and socioeconomic inequality in the workplace and at home. My current research examines the effects of family-friendly policies on labor market choices, productivity, family structure, education, and health outcomes. I use state, national, and institutional policy changes as quasi-experimental variation in access to paid leave in order to identify causal estimates of program effects. My research suggests that paid leave benefits can have large welfare-improving effects and may be a way to reduce socioeconomic disparities in health and labor market outcomes. It also highlights the fact that some policies that are aimed at promoting gender equality in the workplace can have negative consequences for women.

I am a Faculty Affiliate at the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).