Women's reliance on informal employment in Mexico is driven in large part by a demand for shorter working hours that the formal sector fails to accommodate. I provide empirical evidence that this flexibility comes from the sector of employment rather than from occupational sorting, and that mothers draw on it specifically around childbirth, when nearly all of the resulting adjustment in hours occurs in the informal sector. I develop a model of labor supply and sector choice with a minimum-hours threshold in the formal sector, and use reduced-form evidence on a shock to childcare availability to identify how responsive mothers' hours are to increased childcare demands. I use the model to evaluate two policy interventions: increasing the availability of short-hour jobs in the formal sector and expanding subsidized childcare. The first reduces informal employment by 15.8 percent, while the second reduces it by only 4.5 percent. This asymmetry shows that it is the interaction between shorter hours flexibility and the rigidity in the formal sector, not time availability on its own, that shapes women's employment decisions.

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.

Urban public transportation infrastructure is crucial for shaping labor market outcomes. In many developing countries, inadequate transit options limits access to formal jobs, causing misallocation into informal employment. We evaluate the impact of a new public transportation system—a cable bus—on the transition to formal employment in Mexico City. Using variation in the change in total and walking commute times, we evaluate three commuting frictions: proximity, job flexibility, and safety. We find that shorter commute times increase employment for women but have little effect for men, while reduced walking times, the most dangerous part of the commute, have the largest effect on formalization for women. These results suggest that it is not the rigidity of formal-sector hours that constrain female formal employment, but rather the duration and unsafe conditions during the commute.