Labor market regulations may constrain the availability of part-time jobs, creating challenges for workers who prefer shorter hours. I provide empirical evidence that mothers with young children in Mexico are more likely to work informally due to the limited availability of short-hour employment in the formal sector. I analyze two distinct life events that increase mothers’ demand for shorter hours: childbirth and the loss of childcare support following the death of a grandmother. In both cases, mothers are more likely to transition to informal employment, with adjustments in working hours occurring exclusively within the informal sector. I develop a model of labor supply and sector choice based on the key assumption that the formal sector does not accommodate shorter hours. Using this model, I evaluate two potential policy interventions: reducing constraints on minimum hours in the formal sector and expanding subsidized childcare. I find that relaxing minimum-hour constraints in the formal sector increases the share of formal employment for women, raises their wages and welfare, and, unlike expanding subsidized childcare, does so without straining the government budget.

The cost of formal childcare in the United States has risen sharply over the past three decades. This paper examines how increases in the price of formal childcare, driven in part by state-level regulatory requirements, affect women's labor market outcomes and childcare arrangements. I instrument for childcare price using state regulations that are unlikely to be directly observable to parents. I find no effect on labor force participation, but a significant reduction in hours worked. Furthermore, an increase in the price of childcare reduces the use of Child Care Centers and the total number of childcare arrangements a woman uses. Contrary to the expectation that these effects concentrate among lower-income families, low-skill and high-skill women respond similarly, despite relying on different types of care at baseline.  These findings suggest that, rather than substituting toward cheaper alternatives, rising prices reduce both women's labor supply and their overall use of formal care, with these effects spread broadly across the income distribution.

We provide new evidence on one of the most salient and least studied determinants of migration: the probability of finding a job. We develop a dynamic spatial search-and-matching general equilibrium framework in which people migrate in order to search for work in a different labor market. To bring the model to the data, we use Tanzania’s annual census of firms, which is unique among low-income countries for having nationally representative data on vacancies and hiring. To isolate the effect of the job-finding rate on migration, we exploit Tanzania’s first minimum wage law, which stipulated different levels across industries. We find evidence of partial compliance with the law, and that firms facing high minimum wages reduced hiring and vacancy posting more than those facing low minimum wages. In the model, the minimum wage has two effects: it increases the expected wage for a searching worker and it reduces the profitability of posting a vacancy for a firm, unless there is a sufficiently large increase in the number of searching workers. We find that the minimum wage induced migration towards labor markets where employment fell the least, rather than those where wages rose the most. This pattern arises because, at low levels of employment, the marginal value of an increase in the job-finding rate is an order of magnitude larger than that of a marginal increase in wages. Because we impose no curvature on the utility function, these estimates likely represent a lower bound on the importance of the job-finding rate for migration.

Public transportation infrastructure is crucial for shaping labor market outcomes, especially in cities across developing countries where inadequate transit options often limit access to formal employment. In cities like Mexico City, formal jobs are typically concentrated in the center, while peripheral areas suffer from long and costly commutes. In this paper, we ask to what extent the lack of public transportation infrastructure causes a misallocation of labor into informal work, and how commuting frictions affect men and women differently. We evaluate the impact of a new public transportation system—a cable bus—on the transition to formal employment. Using changes in commute times, we analyze the relevance of three key frictions: proximity, flexibility, and safety. Our findings show that reduced commute times encourage shifts from informal to formal employment, with significantly larger effects for women. Notably, shorter walking times are the most critical factor for women, highlighting that safety concerns are a major barrier keeping women out of formal employment.