This paper studies how exposure to industrial robots at different stages of the life cycle affects educational investment and adult labor-market outcomes. Using a cohort–state pseudo-panel and a shift–share measure of U.S. robot adoption instrumented with foreign robot diffusion, I estimate dynamic effects by exploiting variation in the life-cycle phase during which cohorts are exposed to automation shocks, allowing the impact of robot adoption to vary depending on the timing of exposure. The estimates show that robot exposure during pre-adulthood reduces college enrollment and completion at typical college-enrollment ages but leads individuals to catch up in educational attainment later in life, ultimately reaching levels comparable to those of less-exposed counterparts. I further decompose these effects into three mediating channels: a family income constraint channel, a contemporaneous wage premium channel, and an expected wage premium channel. Finally, I examine whether this delayed catch-up in education translates into improvements in later-life wages and employment. These results point to the value of policy flexibility in supporting skill acquisition or retraining when needed.

This study investigates a unique incentive-based affirmative action program in South Korea’s academic labor market. Specifically, I analyze the effects of a 2018 policy requiring all national and public universities in South Korea to ensure that neither gender constitutes less than 25% of tenure-track or tenured faculty at the university level, with noncompliance resulting in reductions in government administrative and financial support. Using department-level faculty composition data for the entire universe of Korean universities and a difference-in-differences methodology, I find that the implementation of gender quotas is associated with an increased share of female new hires in national and public universities. Furthermore, using web-scraped individual-level data on tenure-track and tenured professors, I explore the differential impact of gender quotas on entry barriers for newly hired professors by gender, focusing on research performance. Analysis of entry barrier-related outcomes is still in progress. 

As the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit (CTC) jointly shape the incentive environment facing low-income families, analyzing their combined effects provides a more accurate view of the policies households actually encounter. Using CPS data from 2000–2019, I estimate the joint intention-to-treat (ITT) effects of EITC and CTC generosity on short-run schooling and labor market decisions among children and young adults in potentially eligible families. Consistent with the findings of single-program studies, greater EITC generosity is associated with higher school enrollment on average, and greater CTC generosity shows little effect on overall schooling or labor supply. However, by examining short-run outcomes and previously unstudied behavioral margins—such as transitions into NEET status—this paper uncovers patterns that earlier work could not observe. EITC generosity raises the likelihood that adolescent males are neither in school nor in the labor force during the academic year by 0.8 percentage points (21 percent), while CTC generosity appears to reduce school enrollment among Asian young adults by up to 24 percentage points (37 percent). These results replicate the broad thrust of existing single-program research while revealing new heterogeneity in youths’ educational and labor market responses that is obscured in average or long-run estimates. The findings suggest that tax-based income supports may influence early-life trajectories in more varied and immediate ways than previously documented.