Research
Research
Working Papers
Families and the Decline in Male Participation [Link][Slides]
Prime-age male labor force participation in the U.S. has been declining steadily since the 1960s, particularly among those without a college degree. Over this same period, the share of men living with their parents has doubled. This paper investigates how housing affordability and family support drive labor supply decisions. Using geographic housing supply constraints as an instrument, I show that rising rents significantly increase parental coresidence. I then develop a dynamic lifecycle model that accounts for changing labor demand, housing prices, and parental income in order to decompose drivers of the participation decline. The results demonstrate that while declining labor demand explains most of the initial falls, rising housing costs and parental resources play a significant role in explaining declines in participation post-2000.
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]
Works in progress
Returns to Experience and the Child Penalty, with Saloni Vadeyar
The child penalty literature treats fertility timing as exogenous, yet women may delay or forgo child-bearing precisely because they anticipate career costs. We study how rising returns to experience shape both child penalties and fertility decisions. Using Current Population Survey data, we document that occupations with steeper wage-experience profiles exhibit larger post-childbirth earnings gaps and greater fertility declines over time. To complement this evidence, we are fielding a survey experiment that elicits women’s perceived child penalties and measures gaps between desired and expected fertility across occupations. Together, the administrative and survey evidence will clarify how modern career structures contribute to delayed and declining fertility.