Research

Working Papers

Who Married, (to) Whom, and Where? Trends in Marriage in the United States, 1850-1940 (link) (with Claudia Olivetti, Daniele Paserman, and Laura Salisbury) Revise and Resubmit at The Review of Economics and Statistics

This paper presents new findings about the relationship between marriage and socioeconomic background in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Imputing socioeconomic status of family of origin from first names, we document a socioeconomic gradient for women in the probability of marriage and the socioeconomic status of husbands. This socioeconomic gradient becomes steeper over time. We investigate the degree to which it can be explained by occupational income divergence across geographic regions. We find that regional divergence explains about one half of the socioeconomic divergence in the probability of marriage, and almost all of the increase in marital sorting. Differences in urbanization rates and the share of foreign-born across states drive most of these differences, while other factors (school attendance, the sex ratio and the share in manufacturing) play a smaller role.

The Big House far from Home: Spatial Distance and Criminal Recidivism (link)

With nearly half of released offenders returning to incarceration within three years (Doleac 2019), the effect of criminal justice policies on criminal behavior is of clear public interest. In this project, I address the question of whether offenders' distance from home during incarceration affects later recidivism. The frequently long distances between offenders and their homes in the US make this relationship of particular interest. To provide causal evidence on this question, I employ a novel two-sample instrumental variables strategy which allows me to overcome data limitations and the potentially endogenous assignment of inmates to facilities. I instrument for an inmate’s distance from home with the average or minimum distance to state facilities from their home county, which varies across county and within county over time due to prison openings and closures. I combine national data on prison admissions and releases with cross-sectional inmate facility assignment information from Florida and Oklahoma. Doubling an inmate’s distance from home decreases the rate of 1-year recidivism by 3.3 percentage points. The deterioration of criminal ties appears to be an important driver of this result, as inmates initially convicted of a crime associated with membership in a criminal network experience the greatest decline in recidivism with distance.

Gender and Group Decision-Making: Evidence from US City Councils (with Emilia Brito, Jesse Bruhn, and Thea How Choon) draft coming soon

How does gender composition influence individual and group behavior? To study this question empirically, we assembled a new, national sample of United States city council elections. Within this sample, we digitized information from the minutes of over 40,000 city-council meetings. These documents describe the number and type of motions proposed by each councilor as well as the outcomes of consequential votes pertaining to the operation of city government. The resulting data includes rich measures of group behavior, individual behavior, city council gender composition, and municipal expenditures. Using a close-election regression discontinuity design, we find that replacing a male councilor with a female councilor results in a 25p.p. increase in the share of motions proposed by women. This is despite causing only a 17p.p. increase in the council female share. We find that the discrepancy is driven, in part, by behavioral changes by isolated female councilors. When a lone woman is joined by a new female colleague, she participates more actively in council discussion by proposing more motions. However, these apparent changes in behavior do not translate into clear differences in spending. Taken together, our results highlight the importance of ``tokenism'' for inhibiting female participation in a real-world, high-stakes setting, and provide mixed evidence on the importance of having a ``critical mass'' of female representation for affecting outcomes in political decision making bodies. 

Work in Progress

The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military (with Kyle Greenberg and Melanie Wasserman)