Working papers
Working papers
Earning More but Less Secure: Unpaid Carers, Paid Work, and the Design of a Cash Allowance (preprint available here)
Unpaid carers face economic penalties, often despite having paid work. Dubbed a ‘new’ social risk, related social policies and research have focused on promoting employment and bolstering the public safety net when insufficient or absent. Yet the design of existing benefit programs might also have ‘new’ perverse effects. Here I ask how large, for how long, among whom, and why, by analysing the UK’s Carer’s Allowance and its earnings limit.
I rely on survey interviews from 15 waves of Understanding Society (2009-2024). Penalties are investigated in terms of economic insecurity, a comprehensive concept spanning incomes and wealth, and combining material indicators and perceptions. With an event-study design, I compare carers with a history of Carer’s Allowance receipt to those without as their earnings progress.
Carers with zero earnings report the highest levels of insecurity. When earnings increase, insecurity declines but not homogeneously. Past the earnings limit, carers with a history of Carer’s Allowance receipt report relatively more arrears with bills and housing, less regular savings, more dissatisfaction with income, and heightened financial worries. The relative gap in insecurity is large and persistent over time. Insecurity also affects other household members, and it is more pronounced for those in working-class positions and renters. These patterns appear unrelated to variation in caregiving involvement. Rather, differences in incomes, employment, and benefit receipt widen past the limit.
By foregrounding the role of policy design, findings speak to studies on social risks and economic insecurity, broadening the case for reform spurred by recent benefit scandals.
Resilience or social reproduction? Parental job loss, children’s prosocial development, and caregiving after the Great Recession (forthcoming in Demographic Research, preprint available here)
BACKGROUND
Family resilience foregrounds personal and relational transformations that help families overcome adversity. Yet, why and from whom resilience is required is often overlooked. Economic downturns are exemplary sites to examine these questions.
OBJECTIVE
I study children’s prosocial development and caregiving as an expression of family resilience in households affected by job loss during the Great Recession in Ireland. From a social reproduction perspective, I posit that the demands and capacities for resilience are unequally shared within families, across generations and following a gendered pattern.
METHOD
I rely on cohort data from children’s early years to adolescence (Growing Up in Ireland, 2008-2022) to estimate growth-curve and OLS models for prosocial development and outcomes tied to caregiving.
FINDINGS
Children whose mothers experienced job loss exhibit steeper prosocial development. Girls with younger siblings drive this finding. At age 13, the same group is more likely to share and fulfil caregiving duties. Findings suggest that mothers might have leaned on their children to maintain some paid work after job loss, stimulating their daughters’ prosocial development and involvement in caregiving.
CONTRIBUTION
The study highlights how economic downturns reinforce the gendered and generational underpinnings that bind the paid and unpaid work of family resilience.
Child Penalties and Public Childcare Shortages under Fiscal Austerity (with Emanuele Fedeli, Visitinps Fellowship Grant 2023)
Linking Household Income to Child Well-Being: An Analysis of Child-Reported Deprivation and Caregiving with Growing Up in Australia (with Yekaterina Chzhen)
Poor Rich Women: Labour Market Effects of De-Subsidising Childcare for Households with High Incomes (with Olivier Marie)
Adequate or Scandalous? Understanding Non-take-up of Social Security Benefits (with Nicolás Soler, NWO XS Grant 2025)
The Sources of Research Variation in Economics (led by Nick Huntington-Klein, Claus C. Portner, Ian McCarthy, and The Many Economists Collaborative on Researcher Variation; preprint available here)
We use a rigorous three-stage many-analysts design to assess how different researcher decisions — specifically data cleaning, research design, and the interpretation of a policy question — affect the variation in estimated treatment effects. A total of 146 research teams each completed the same causal inference task three times each: first with few constraints, then using a shared research design, and finally with pre-cleaned data in addition to a specified design. We find that even when analyzing the same data, teams reach different conclusions. In the first stage, the interquartile range (IQR) of the reported policy effect was 3.1 percentage points, with substantial outliers. Surprisingly, the second stage, which restricted research design choices, exhibited slightly higher IQR (4.0 percentage points), largely attributable to imperfect adherence to the prescribed protocol. By contrast, the final stage, featuring standardized data cleaning, narrowed variation in estimated effects, achieving an IQR of 2.4 percentage points. Reported sample sizes also displayed significant convergence under more restrictive conditions, with the IQR dropping from 295,187 in the first stage to 29,144 in the second, and effectively zero by the third. Our findings underscore the critical importance of data cleaning in shaping applied microeconomic results and highlight avenues for future replication efforts