Abstract: Do the jobs that reward women's talents also offer the flexibility that they need? Women are more socially skilled, but social skill intensity and temporal flexibility are inversely correlated across occupations. Guided by a model of occupational choice, I provide evidence that this correlation creates a trade-off between women's comparative advantage in social tasks and their demand for flexible hours. As a consequence, women's disproportionate gains from each job attribute come at the expense of the other, which exacerbates the gender wage gap. I use event studies around first births to provide evidence that job inflexibility widens gender gaps in wages and employment even more following shocks to women's relative demand for flexibility, thus ruling it in as a mechanism. And, consistent with women’s skills being both valued yet constrained in highly social and inflexible occupations, the adoption of flexibility-enhancing technology has been concentrated in these sectors.

Abstract: What caused the rapid rise in human capital accumulation in the early 20th century? This paper examines the role of the birth control movement, led by Margaret Sanger, which facilitated the roll out of over 600 birth control clinics across the United States. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that children whose mothers gained access to birth control were less likely to have younger siblings, more likely to attend school and be literate, and less likely to report working. These findings are consistent with a quantity-quality tradeoff, in which investments in education came at the high opportunity cost of forgone income via child labor. 

Abstract: The advances of artificial intelligence (AI) are built on the groundwork laid by researchers. We study the labor market competition between academia and industry for AI researchers and its consequences for public knowledge production. Using data on 150,000 computer science researchers, we document a major reallocation of AI talent toward top technology firms between 2005 and 2020. Publications at AI conferences predict transitions to top firms more strongly than to academia. Exploiting acceptance decisions at a leading AI conference, we compare accepted authors with similar rejected authors and find that a publication increases the probability of moving to a top firm by 2–6 percentage points in the next 1-3 years. Sorting to top firms is stronger for male researchers, whereas female students and postdocs are more likely to get tenure-track positions following a publication. Researchers who move to top firms subsequently publish fewer papers, resulting in approximately 1,000 fewer AI papers and 2,000 fewer papers in other computer science areas per year in the public domain.

Abstract: In work environments where people interact, cross-cultural communication frictions may increase employment segregation and serve as a labor market barrier to minority groups. Building on this intuition, we develop a simple model in which the productivity of social interactions between individuals is increasing in their social skills and the similarity of their communication styles. Consistent with this idea, we document that among women, black Americans, and Latin American immigrants, the rise in social task-intensive employment since 1980 has been concentrated in areas where their own group's labor market representation is high. Leveraging coded audio data, we show evidence in line with the model's two predictions: workers with majority group speech patterns (1) are more likely to be employed in a social task intensive jobs and (2) exhibit a more positive association between their own social skills and the social task intensity of their job. We conclude with evidence that minority groups are more responsive to social skill demand shocks in labor markets where they are more populous.

Abstract: When a husband migrates, his wife may control more household resources and therefore change how the household spends income. Given the prevalence of seasonal migration in developing countries, even these temporary changes could impact economic development. The extent to which these changes persist after migrant spells will magnify these consequences. Using panel data on rural households in Nepal, we examine how a husband’s migration interacts with intra-household decision-making and consumption patterns both during and after migration spells. We find a husband’s absence is associated with a 10-percentage point increase in the expenditure decisions over which the wife has full control. This coincides with a shift away from expenditures on alcohol and tobacco in favor of children’s clothing and education. Importantly, we find that husbands resume their role in decisions following a migrant’s return, but decisions are more likely to be made jointly. These persistent effects are consistent with a model where households are pushed to a new, more equitable equilibrium, then form habits that in turn cause the new equilibrium to stick, thus facilitating long-term cultural change in gender norms.