Research
Research
Publications, working papers, and work in progress — spanning economic growth and development, family and gender economics, inequality and poverty, and demographic economics. Also on Google Scholar, CEPR and IDEAS.
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Working Papers
Working Papers
We propose a household bargaining model explaining the mixed evidence on paternity leave: its effects depend critically on the wage gap within a couple. For “intermediate-gap” couples, the policy can be transformative — shifting childcare and housework toward a more egalitarian arrangement, boosting mothers' employment and earnings. A regression discontinuity design in Spain confirms large effects on this marginal group that average estimates mask.
We demonstrate that the property-rights laws that empowered married women in the 19th-century U.S. also caused a significant reduction in fertility. The mechanism was an increase in wives' bargaining power, which they used to limit family size in the face of spousal disagreement rooted in maternal mortality risk. Women's empowerment accounts for approximately 18% of the U.S. fertility decline during 1850–1920.
The California Oil Boom of the early 20th century is a historical case of highly successful, resource-driven development. Oil discovery within a unique institutional context — privately held resource rights and minimal state taxation — led to a broad distribution of wealth, financial deepening, and rapid economic diversification: a compelling counter-narrative to the resource-curse literature.
When investment primarily increases a project's probability of success, spreading a fixed budget across multiple independent projects can paradoxically increase portfolio risk through a mean-preserving spread. This offers an alternative explanation for the low diversification observed in venture capital and entrepreneurial finance.
Analyzing Stalin's 1936 abortion ban, we find that while it achieved its goal of higher birth rates, it came at a devastating cost: a surge in infant and maternal mortality from unsafe illegal abortions. Children born immediately after such restrictions face worse individual outcomes and contribute to negative societal externalities. Policies that curtail women's autonomy, even when demographically “successful,” can generate severe unintended human and societal costs.
Risk aversion alone — without fixed costs or non-convex technologies — can explain why the poor forgo high-return investments. When investment increases the probability of success rather than guaranteeing it, poverty traps emerge naturally. Financial products designed to mitigate risk, such as state-contingent repayment loans, may be more effective than traditional microcredit.
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Linking parents and children across census decades in IPUMS data, we compare outcomes of children whose mothers married after the enactment of property rights with those from marriages formed before. Preliminary findings show the children of the “liberated” generation achieved higher education and wages — a shock to one generation of women catalyzed an intergenerational revolution in human capital.
We develop a household bargaining model incorporating the social stigma costs, driven by gender norms, incurred by husbands who engage in childcare. Paternity leave can strengthen marriages among already-egalitarian couples — a “strength in numbers” effect — while increasing divorce risk among couples induced to shift from a specialized to an egalitarian arrangement.
Publications
Publications
A country's occupational composition is a powerful predictor of its aggregate retirement behavior. This links major labor market trends — skill-biased technological change and international trade — to the fiscal sustainability of social security systems and economic well-being in later life.
The decline of childlessness among highly educated American women is driven by marketization: as market services substitute for parental time, the most educated women no longer face the starkest career-family trade-off.
Women's Liberation as a Financial Innovation
Journal of Finance, Vol. 74, pp. 2915–2956
with Moshe Hazan & David Weiss
Exploiting the staggered repeal of coverture across 19th-century U.S. states, we show that granting married women property rights triggered a portfolio shift from real estate to financial assets, a positive shock to the supply of credit, lower interest rates, and a reallocation of labor toward capital-intensive sectors. Women's rights were not only a matter of justice — they were a financial innovation that accelerated American industrialization.
Journal of Economic Growth, Vol. 23(4), pp. 427–463
with Michael Bar, Moshe Hazan, Oksana Leukhina & David Weiss
We structurally estimate a model in which high-income families can substitute market childcare for parental time. The marketization channel proves dominant: the sharp rise in U.S. income inequality between 1980 and 2010 was a primary driver of the new demographic regime in which richer, more educated families have more children.
[Abstract to be added — send me the paper's abstract and I'll drop it in.]
We were the first to document that the relationship between women's education and fertility in the U.S. has become U-shaped: highly educated women now have more children than those with intermediate education, while simultaneously working longer hours. A theory of marketization — substituting market services for parental time — explains this counterintuitive pattern.
Historical preference for sons led parents with first-born girls to have larger families, systematically disadvantaging daughters through resource dilution. The reversal of the gender gap in education occurred not merely through changing norms, but because rising returns to education endogenously eliminated the economic incentive for son-preference.
Trade expansion in female-intensive sectors does not always benefit women. In capital-abundant countries, liberalization can trigger an influx of male workers into expanding female-intensive sectors, diluting the capital-to-female-labor ratio, lowering women's relative wages and pushing them out of the labor force — a result supported by post-NAFTA U.S. evidence.
[Abstract to be added — send me the paper's abstract and I'll drop it in.]
We challenge the widely held view that rising longevity drove the transition from stagnation to growth by spurring human capital investment. When parents jointly choose fertility and education, gains in children's longevity raise the returns to both quantity and quality of offspring — a neutrality benchmark showing the net effect on human capital is ambiguous. A strong complementarity between health and education is necessary to reconcile the historical evidence.
Note: two abstracts (Economic Growth and Sector Dynamics; Talent Utilization) are placeholders — send them and I’ll drop them in. Publication cards currently link to the main research page; individual paper-page links can be added when available.
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