Publications
The Dynamics of Abusive Relationships (with Abi Adams, Kristiina Huttunen, and Emily Nix), Accepted by Quarterly Journal of Economics
Enter Stage Left: Immigration and the Creative Arts in America (with K. Pun Winichakul), Accepted by Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization
The Effects of Housing Vouchers on Labor Supply: A Structural Approach, Forthcoming at Journal of Labor Economics
Violence Against Women at Work (with Abi Adams, Kristiina Huttunen, and Emily Nix), The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 139, Issue 2, May 2024, Pages 937–991
Childhood Experience and Children’s Altruism Toward Parents: The Twins Experiment (with Junsen Zhang and Hongliang Zhang), Journal of European Economic Association, Volume 21, Issue 4, August 2023, Pages 1647–1685
The Effect of Mandatory Access to Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs on Foster Care Admissions (with Rania Gihleb and Osea Giuntella), Journal of Human Resources, 57(1), pp.217-240, Jan 2022
How does birth endowment affect individual resilience to an adolescent adversity? (with Rufei Guo and Junsen Zhang), Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Volume 196, April 2022, Pages 251-265
Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs and Neonatal Outcomes (with Rania Gihleb and Osea Giuntella), Regional Science and Urban Economics, Volume 81, 103497, March 2020
Working papers
Effects of Parental Death on Labor Market Outcomes and Gender Inequalities (with Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen), IZA Discussion Paper Series No. 17127
Nearly everyone experiences the death of a parent in adulthood, but little is known about the effects of parental death on adult children’s labor market outcomes and the underlying mechanisms. In this paper, we use Danish administrative data to examine the effects of losing a parent on individual labor market outcomes and its contribution to gender earnings inequalities. Our empirical design leverages the timing of sudden, first parental deaths, allowing us to focus on the health and family support channels. Our findings reveal enduring negative effects on the earnings of both adult sons and daughters: sons’ earnings drop by 2% in the fifth year after parental death, while daughters’ earnings drop by 3% during the same period. Exploring the underlying mechanisms, we observe that both women and men experience increased mental health issues after parental loss, albeit manifesting differently: women tend to seek psychological assistance more frequently, while men receive more mental health-related and opioid prescriptions. Furthermore, we find that women with young children experience a comparatively larger drop (around 4%) in earnings after parental death due to the loss of informal childcare, a factor that significantly contributes to the gender pay gap. Lastly, we show that women experience a greater decline in earnings if their surviving parent requires higher levels of eldercare. These findings collectively underscore a substantial labor market penalty for individuals who experience parental death and emphasize the role of informal care in contributing to gender pay disparities.
The Boomerang Kids: Unemployment, Job Mismatch and Coresidence (with Stefania Albanesi and Rania Gihleb), NBER Working Paper #30397
Labor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents. The unemployment rate at 23-27 years old for the 1996 college graduation cohort was 9%, whereas it rose to 12% for the 2013 graduation cohort. While only 25% of the 1996 cohort lived with their parents, 31% for the 2013 cohort chose this option. Our hypothesis is that the declining availability of "matched jobs" that require a college degree is a key factor behind these developments. Using a structurally estimated model of child-parent decisions, in which coresidence improves college graduates' quality of job matches, we find that lower matched job arrival rates explain two thirds of the rise in unemployment and coresidence between the 2013 and 1996 graduation cohorts. Rising wage dispersion is also important for the increase in unemployment, while declining parental income, rising student loan balances and higher rental costs only play a marginal role.
The Economic Costs of Rape (with Abi Adams, Kristiina Huttunen, and Emily Nix)
Rape and sexual assault are common worldwide: one in twelve women across 28 EU countries have experienced a rape (European Institute for Gender Inequality, 2012). Yet there is no systematic evidence on how sexual violence affects women's economic outcomes. We harness detailed administrative data from Finland to provide new empirical facts on the economic effect of rape on victims and its spillovers. A third of police reports for rape involved victims younger than 21 years old at the time of the assault. We show that the age-25 employment and college completion rates of younger victims are 12.8 p.p and 10 p.p lower respectively than those of other young women with the same (pre-event) GPA and family background. For older victims, we use a matched difference-in-difference design to show that rape has a large and persistent economic impact on women: victims' employment falls by 7.8 percentage points and their labor market earnings decline 16.5% relative to observationally equivalent women in the five years following the assault. These results are robust to controlling for a variety of shocks preceding rape that could make it more likely for a woman to be victimized and independently suppress her economic outcomes. We also document important spillovers of these crimes to the victim's parents and peers. Mothers and fathers experience significant declines in their employment and female schoolmates experience a deterioration in mental health. Last, we show that higher clearance rates of rape cases mitigate the negative impacts on victims. Together, these results indicate that preventing and addressing sexual violence is a vital economic issue.
Rationed Fertility: Treatment Effect Heterogeneity in the Child Quantity--Quality Tradeoff (with Rufei Guo, Junjian Yi, and Junsen Zhang)
We develop a generalized theory of rationed fertility to analyze treatment effect heterogeneity in the child quantity--quality (QQ) tradeoff. An exogenous increase in fertility can either be desired---that is, a move toward optimal fertility; or undesired---that is, a move away from optimal fertility. Our theory derives a new positive rationing income effect on child quality for desired fertility increases, but a negative rationing income effect for undesired fertility increases. We explore the natural experiment of twin births and China's “One-child” policy to identify treatment effects of desired and undesired fertility increases. A structural estimation shows that variations in rationing income effects explains 79% of the treatment effect heterogeneity between desired and undesired fertility increases. Our study highlights the importance of distinguishing between desired and undesired changes when evaluating social programs.