Research

Working papers:

• Welfare effects of increasing transfers to young adults: Theory and Evidence.  (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive framework to evaluate the welfare effects of increasing social assistance to young adults. Using bank transaction data, I estimate that the social marginal utility of providing additional social assistance to an average young adult is at least 2.6 times greater than that of extending similar assistance to an average older adult. This substantial difference arises primarily from young adults' higher marginal utility of consumption, evidenced by their significantly greater marginal propensity to consume. Accounting for the crowding-out effect of parents' transfers to young adults only modestly offsets this difference. Furthermore, I conduct a survey on age-based redistribution preferences, revealing that society assigns higher welfare weights to younger individuals, further amplifying the age-based disparity in social marginal utility. Balancing benefits and costs, I estimate that increasing social assistance to young, non-student adults yields welfare gains three times higher than programs targeting older adults. When targeting students from low-income backgrounds, the relative welfare effect rises to a factor of 8. These findings imply that welfare could be significantly enhanced by redistributing resources from older to younger individuals, with a particularly high impact when targeting young adults from the poorest backgrounds.

• How do migrants and natives search for jobs? with Lena Hensvik, Thomas Le Barbanchon and Roland Rathelot

Abstract: In this paper, we explore job-search-related sources of the migrant-native earnings gap and unemployment duration gap. Using a sample of over 400,000 jobseekers from the largest online platform in Sweden, we find that migrants from developing countries send more applications and apply to jobs that pay 6.7\% less (3.4\% less when controlling for observable characteristics).  This behaviour could stem from migrants expecting a higher penalty in the success of their applications for higher-paying jobs, or from information frictions. Leveraging data on hires that we can match to applications at the worker-employer level, we show that the probability of being hired is indeed lower for migrants than for natives, but that the gap is not larger for higher-paying jobs, suggesting the relevance of information imperfections. To test this hypothesis, we take advantage of a randomised experiment that nudged jobseekers to apply to randomly different sets of jobs. We find that migrants nudged to apply to higher-paying jobs experience higher (rather than lower) probabilities of being hired, which supports the hypothesis of undershooting due to information frictions.

• Maternal Childcare Preferences and Labor Supply of Mothers with Léa Dubreuil (slides available upon request)

Abstract: This paper investigates the respective roles of labor market constraints, childcare constraints, and maternal preferences in driving both the post-childbirth drop in mothers’ working hours and their limited responsiveness to family policies. We develop a labor supply model that incorporates preferences for maternal care and conduct a survey of 1,400 highly educated women. We find that a substantial share of the post-birth decline in hours worked reflects unconstrained choices, suggesting that the reduction in hours for this group is unlikely to be dropped by policies that solely target constraints. We show that while both labor market and childcare constraints shape mothers’ working hours, their effects are heterogeneous and, on average, offsetting, as constraints lead some women to work less than they would like, but others to work more. Consistent with the literature, we find that childcare subsidies have no net effect on hours worked, as heterogeneous constraint effects lead to varied positive and negative responses to the policy, which cancel each other out. Yet, these policies do effectively relax childcare constraints, thereby aligning actual drop in labor supply more closely with mothers’ preferences. Finally, we examine the role of social norms and beliefs and find that perceived returns to maternal care on child well-being significantly influence mothers’ preferences to stay at home.