Research
Research
Working Papers
Families and the Decline in Male Participation [Link][Slides]
Male prime-aged labor force participation has been steadily declining in the United States for the last sixty years. Over the same period, there has been a large increase in the share of prime-aged men living with their parents. I examine whether changes in household structure help explain this long-run decline in participation. I first show that trends in household structure and labor force participation vary sharply with men’s level of education: for less educated men, large declines in participation coincide with large increases in coresidence. I rationalize these patterns in a dynamic structural model of coresidence and labor supply decisions. In the model, living at home lowers the effective cost of not working by reducing housing expenses and providing shared household goods, which weakens labor supply incentives. Feeding in observed changes in parental income and housing costs, the model accounts for a substantial share of the participation decline. I supplement the model with reduced-form evidence using an instrumental variable for local house price changes. The results highlight the role of family structure in shaping aggregate labor supply.
Love and the (Superstar) City: Housing Costs and the Geography of Marriage with Elena Pellegrini [Link][Slides]
We provide new evidence on the drivers of assortative marriage in the United States. Using four decades of microdata from the American Community Survey, we document substantial spatial variation in assortative mating over income: it is strongest in areas with higher housing costs and a larger share of college-educated workers. Instrumenting local housing prices with variation induced by land-use regulation, we establish a causal link between housing costs and assortative mating. To interpret these findings, we develop a marriage-market model that embeds a search-and-matching framework within a spatial superstar-city environment. In the model, tighter housing markets and skill concentration jointly raise the degree of assortative matching. Estimating the model allows us to decompose the contribution of these forces to both the long-run trend and the spatial dispersion in homogamy.
Publications
Job Loss, Subjective Expectations and Household Spending, with Gianni La Cava, Reserve Bank of Australia Research Discussion Paper No 2021-08 [Link]