Hanna Wang

Research

Working Papers

Fertility and Family Leave Policies in Germany: Optimal Policy in a Dynamic Framework

Revise & Resubmit, The Review of Economic Studies

I develop and estimate a life-cycle discrete-choice model of fertility and female labor supply to study the optimal design of a range of child-related policies. First, I examine two German reforms that introduced wage-contingent parental leave payments and expanded access to low-cost public childcare. I find that both reforms raised completed fertility, with the parental leave reform having a particularly strong impact on highly educated women. Second, I solve for a budget-neutral optimal policy portfolio that maximizes either aggregate welfare or fertility, while ensuring that welfare and fertility do not decline for any education group. I consider four prominent child subsidies as well as the degree of tax jointness. My results show that optimal policy has the potential to increase welfare by 0.5% or fertility by 5.7%. While the solutions are qualitatively similar, they prioritize different policy instruments depending on the specific objective being targeted.

Minimum Wages, Parental and Child Health (with Jere Behrman and Farhan Majid)

PIER Working Paper 23-020 BSE Working Paper 1417

Most minimum wage (MW) research has focused on high-income countries and direct impacts on wages and employment, while little is known about a) low- and middle-income countries in which most people affected by MWs live; b) the broader impacts, including on parental and inter-generational health. This study contributes to filling these two gaps by studying the effects of MWs on employment, earnings, parental health, and child health outcomes in Indonesia. Our analysis is based on the Indonesian Family Life Survey, a rich longitudinal dataset, merged with province-specific MWs, and uses individual and biological-siblings fixed effects and distributional effects based on lagged panel data. We find that MWs increase men’s earnings, with small and insignificant results on labor market outcomes for women. This is true, especially for the lower parts of earnings distributions (where MWs are more likely binding). In our health analyses, the estimated effects of MWs on parental hemoglobin as well as on standardized child height scores and pregnancy complications suggest MWs significantly improve parental and child health several years after birth. Moreover, the effects are strongest for children whose fathers are in the lowest part of the earnings distribution.

Publications

Ranking and Search Effort in Matching (with Joonbae Lee), Economic Theory, 2021.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-021-01391-4

This paper studies the relationship between search effort and workers' ranking by employers. We propose a matching model in which employers' common preferences over a continuum of heterogeneous workers affect the incentives of workers to choose a number of applications to send out. We show that in equilibrium, the relationship is hump-shaped if there is a sufficiently large number of workers relative to vacancies: Highly-ranked and lowly-ranked workers send out fewer applications than workers of mid-range rank. This arises due to two opposing forces driving the incentive of applicants. Increasing the number of applications acts as insurance against unemployment, but is less effective when the probability of success for each application is low. This mechanism exacerbates the negative employment outcomes of low-rank workers. We discuss comparative statics with regards to the size of the vacancy pool and application cost, and show that, in contrast to the market equilibrium, planner's solution exhibits the number of applications monotonously decreasing in rank.

Selected Work-in-Progress

Job Search and Mobility Over the Life-Cycle: Implications for the Child Penalty (with Minji Bang)
What Makes a Good Job? Unpacking Preferences over Job Amenities (with Minji Bang and Katarina Kuske)
Labor Market Implications of Fixed-Term Contract Duration: Evidence from a Dutch Reform

School, Work or Marriage? Gender Gaps in Child Development (with André Gröger)
Skill Mismatch by Gender in Job Applications (with Fabrizio Colella and Hannah Liepmann)

Selected Presentations and Academic Visits

2025 (scheduled): Columbia Junior Micro-Macro Labor Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison, PUC Chile, Washington University, Western University, McMaster University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, IZA & University of Bonn, SOLE/EALE/AASLE, World Congress of the Econometric Society, CReAM-RFBerlin Workshop, RFBerlin (Sep 15-26), Chung-Ang University, Berlin School of Economics, University of Bergen, UPF Workshop in Honor of Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, University of Geneva, SAEe Simposio, Christmas Meeting of German Economists Abroad
2024: Goethe University, University of Bath, University of Bristol, New Advances in Family Economics Workshop, USI Lugano, LIFE Workshop in Copenhagen, SED, 1st Meeting of the Georgian Economic Association, The Rockwool Foundation Copenhagen, Georgetown University, University of Houston, Rice University, UMichigan PSC, Cowles Foundation at Yale University (Oct 21-25), Minneapolis Fed OIGI, University of Rochester, Boston College, Tepper Business School (CMU), SEA, Micro Macro Labor Conference at the SF Fed, SAEe Simposio, Christmas Meeting of German Economists Abroad
2023: City, University of London, Universität Regensburg, University of Oxford (Lunch Talk), University of Cambridge, University of Birkbeck, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Universitat de Barcelona, CReAM at UCL, EEA-ESEM, CReAM-RFBerlin Workshop, Concordia University, McGill, Bocconi (Brown Bag), UB Macroeconomics Workshop, VI Spanish Macro Network Workshop, Johns Hopkins University (Brown Bag), SEA, University of Copenhagen (CEBI)

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