WORKING PAPERS

• Telework availability, and women's labor market outcomes - Job Market Paper
  
  

This paper studies the extent to which greater availability of remote work opportunities alleviates childbirth related costs for women’s careers and affects their fertility choices. I formulate a structural dynamic life-cycle model that incorporates women’s joint decision-making on fertility and employment type choices. The model is estimated through simulated method of moments using NLSY97 data. I find that mothers of children under 5 years old face a higher disutility of work in jobs which require on-site presence compared to jobs that allow the flexibility of working from home. I use the estimated model to simulate the effect of policies that affect the availability of remote work jobs. I find that extending the flexibility of remote work to all mothers of young children increases their employment by 4%, however this effect is driven by increased fertility rates among women who would have been employed before

the policy change, with a negligible change in women’s overall labor supply. In contrast, increased supply of remote work jobs for all workers improves labor market participation for all women unconditional on fertility status.

Remote work conference 2023; APPAM 2023

• Maternal wealth implications of child incarceration - with Brielle Bryan (Rice University) [Link]
  Revise and Resubmit, Demography 

Qualitative research suggests that mothers play a critical role in supporting adult children both during and after experiences of incarceration, yet the implications of incarceration for the parents of incarcerated individuals have been relatively unexplored in existing research. Using mother-child linked data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult study, we investigate whether and why child incarceration appears to influence maternal wealth. We find a significantly negative relationship between child incarceration and maternal wealth. This relationship, however, is highly heterogeneous across forms of wealth. Separate models by race and ethnicity suggest that child incarceration may be much more detrimental in dollar terms for white women, but the financial asset penalty associated with child incarceration is larger in percentage terms for black women. 

• Child incarceration and maternal labor market outcomes - with Brielle Bryan (Rice University) [Link]

This paper investigates the impact of child incarceration on a household’s labor supply, paying particular attention to the consequences for maternal labor market participation. We make use of the rich longitudinal information on mothers and their children available in National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult data. Our analysis shows that in the face of increased demand of time needed to look after the incarcerated child, traditional gender roles surrounding women as primary caregivers play a significant role in determining time allocations. In particular, married mothers with partners present suffer from negative labor supply effects of child incarceration while father’s labor supply remains largely unresponsive. These negative labor supply effects are particularly sizeable for white mothers. Policy makers and advocates aiming to reform the juvenile justice system should take into consideration the labor supply trade-offs that families face in supporting their incarcerated children.