Research 


Working Papers

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 optimal design of a range of child-related policies. I first evaluate two recent German reforms: A change in parental leave from fixed payments to wage-contingent payments for a shorter duration and an expansion of low-cost public childcare. I find that the parental leave reform increases fertility and lowers employment rates but only among highly-educated women. The childcare reform increases fertility and employment evenly across all women. Second, I solve for an optimal policy portfolio that satisfies the post-reform budget, considering different tax regimes for married couples. The objectives are maximizing overall fertility with a utility constraint under joint and individual taxation. While in the former case, only modest gains around .3% in fertility can be achieved, in the latter the increase is over 10%. The joint taxation solution re-allocates subsidies from married childless couples to families with children as well as increases mothers’ incentives to work.

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

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

Selected Presentations