I am a PhD student in Economics at Bocconi University and an affiliate with CESifo.
My research interests lie in the economics of family, labour, and migration. In my current work, I investigate how family dynamics and non-wage amenities in the workplace shape labour market outcomes.
I will join the Economics department at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management as an Assistant Professor in August 2026.
You can find my CV here.
Contact: katarina.kuske[at]phd.unibocconi.it
Co-Parenting and Careers after Divorce (Job Market Paper)
Selected for the EALE Tour 2026
Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award 2026
Joint physical custody (co-parenting) is an increasingly popular post-divorce parenting arrangement, and while it benefits children, the economic implications for parents are theoretically ambiguous. I investigate empirically how co-parenting affects parents’ labour market outcomes after divorce, exploiting a custody reform in the Netherlands that encouraged co-parenting and increased its uptake by 7.6 percentage points among parents with young children. I find that mothers who divorce after the reform experience a 0.8% wage decline in an intention-to-treat framework relative to those divorcing before the reform, which implies an average wage loss of about 10% for compliers. This is driven by slower wage growth for mothers in the treatment group, who are less likely to move further away to access better-paid employment. The findings suggest that co-parenting ties both parents to a fixed location, reducing geographical mobility. Treated mothers also reduce their hours temporarily -- largely due to rising overtime in the control group -- while fathers’ wages and hours remain unaffected. The wage penalty is concentrated among mothers who were secondary earners during marriage and younger at the time of divorce. These patterns are consistent with couples placing greater weight on the primary earner’s career when making location decisions, which makes the post-divorce location constraint under co-parenting bind more tightly for mothers than fathers, thereby widening the gender wage gap. My results indicate an efficiency cost of location constraints under co-parenting.
What Makes a Good Job? Evidence from a Large-Scale Survey of Workplace Amenities, with Minji Bang and Hanna Wang
By linking large-scale survey data on workplace amenities, representing 2.4% of the Dutch workforce, to administrative records, we provide new evidence on how amenities shape labor market outcomes. From a rich set of survey questions, we construct ten amenity indices, covering dimensions such as work from home, support from colleagues and supervisors, task complexity and intensity, and learning opportunities. We document how amenities vary with wages and by worker characteristics, sectors, and occupations. Variance decompositions show that firms account for the largest share of variation for most amenities, exceeding the share explained by occupations and individual characteristics. Amenities strongly predict job satisfaction, job search, worker retention, and absenteeism, even when controlling for standard worker and job attributes. Finally, when treating these outcomes as proxies for workers' job value, we consistently find that amenities amplify compensation inequality beyond what is captured by wages alone.
How do workers differ in their preferences for workplace amenities, and to what extent do these preferences shape sorting across firms? Drawing on a large-scale Dutch survey linked to administrative records, we find that self-reported preferences for amenities, such as work-from-home, supervisory quality, learning opportunities and job security, strongly predict sorting. Workers who report higher valuations of a specific amenity are more likely to transition to firms that offer it, even after accounting for differences in gender, age, and education. Building on these patterns, we develop and estimate a dynamic model of labor market sorting in which workers move between firms offering different bundles of wages and multidimensional amenities. The model allows us to quantify the value of amenities relative to wages and to assess how preference heterogeneity contributes to firm-level sorting and wage inequality. Finally, we analyze counterfactual scenarios in which specific amenities are expanded, motivated by the rise of work-from-home arrangements and national policies that establish minimum levels of workplace flexibility.
We aim to understand how returns to FDI and remittances contribute to cross-country risk-sharing over the business cycle. First, we document the relationship between these flows and GDP growth in the recipient economies: FDI behaves procyclically and remittances countercyclically to receiving countries' growth. We then build a model, using these facts to inform our modelling choices. Estimating the model’s underlying parameters allows us to quantitatively evaluate the effect of economic policies to further integrate the capital market, such as lowering the cost of sending remittances or FDI, on capital flows and the intensity of business cycle fluctuations. A key benefit of such integration is that it can help share risk across countries. Our model allows us to directly compare the welfare effects of FDI and remittances, highlighting their distinct roles in cross-country risk sharing.
Temporary migration entails benefits, but also costs, for sending and receiving countries, IZA World of Labor 2022: 503, with Simon Görlach