Childcare Availability During Nonstandard Hours and Household Choices (JMP)
Around 28% of workers with young children experience nonstandard work schedules. While these schedules often carry wage premiums, access to high-quality, affordable childcare during these hours remains limited. Focusing on these households, I estimate a structural model of maternal labor supply, childcare choices, and child skill development, allowing for heterogeneity in wages, childcare availability, and quality-price distributions across time periods. Estimates show the schedule-related wage premium ranges from 3.8% to 22.3%, and providers operating during nonstandard hours are, on average, one standard deviation lower in quality. Improving childcare quality during nonstandard hours, through Head Start, could significantly benefit lower-SES households.
Unstable Leisure Complementarity and Dual Career Couples' Joint Retirement Behavior
This paper investigates how relationship dynamics within dual-career households influence joint retirement decisions. Using survey data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I document that spouses could differ in their perceived closeness, which fluctuates over time and may significantly affect their labor market behavior. To analyze these dynamics, I develop a dynamic life-cycle model in which couples make joint retirement decisions, building on existing literature that emphasizes leisure complementarity. A key innovation of the model is the explicit modeling of heterogeneous and time-varying preferences for joint leisure. I estimate the model using maximum likelihood methods with HRS data. The findings reveal that couples do not always enjoy shared leisure time and, in some cases, even experience distaste for it. When a wife has a low preference for joint leisure, her leisure is only half as enjoyable when her husband is retired compared to when he is working. For a husband with low preference, leisure is 93% as enjoyable when his wife is retired. Preferences for joint leisure are also estimated to be more stable among wives than husbands. Findings from this paper also suggest that disutility from shared leisure may be an important, previously underexplored factor shaping retirement timing and post-retirement labor force participation.
Collaborative Robots in the Workplace: Occupational, Geographic, and Demographic Opportunities for Technology Adoption (with Lindsay Jacobs, Natalie Duncombe)
Collaborative robots, or "cobots,'' represent a growing share of industrial robots and have the potential to boost productivity, enhance workplace flexibility, and improve working conditions across a wide range of industries. Drawing on expert assessments of cobot capabilities and detailed occupational task data from O*NET, we develop the Cobot Adoption Potential Index (CAPI), a measure of the technical potential for cobot integration across occupations. We link CAPI to data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to characterize the demographic composition of workers in high-potential occupations and to identify the industries and regions where these occupations are concentrated. Workers in these occupations tend to be younger on average, but cobot technology may also expand opportunities for older workers and those with work-related disabilities. These results provide a basis for targeting policies—such as training and workforce development programs—to the workers and locations most likely to be affected. Finally, we document that high-CAPI occupations currently exhibit elevated workplace injury rates, highlighting opportunities for cobots to contribute to improved occupational safety.
Child Care Policy and Informal Care (with Joel McMurry) [Updated Draft Coming Soon]
Early childcare experiences vary widely across the distribution of socio-economic status (SES), and sizable skill gaps open up before children enter publicly-provided schooling. SES gradients in the quality of informal, relative-provided care are particularly large. To understand how variation in the availability and quality of informal care contributes to skill inequality, we estimate a model of child care, mother labor supply, and child skill development, allowing for unequal access to informal care. We exploit the timing of grandmother deaths relative to a child’s birth to identify substitution patterns between informal, formal, and mother-provided child care. We quantify the effect of having access to informal care on child development and mother labor supply, and we estimate that, for a substantial fraction of less-advantaged children, the availability of informal care is detrimental to skill development. We ex ante analyze the effects of policies such as universal public daycare, subsidies for formal care, and cash transfers, and show that accounting for heterogeneity in the availability and quality of informal care is quantitatively important for estimating the effect that such policies might have on skill inequality at the point of entry into K-12 schooling.
Occupation Choices of Young Parents (with Zhuoli Chen)