Abstract: Do the jobs that reward women's talents also offer the flexibility that they need? I document that 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: 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 where jobs vary in the intensity of social interaction and the productivity of interactions is increasing in both social skills and communication style similarity of agents. We find both micro and macro level evidence consistent with the model's predictions. At the micro level, we use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to show that an individual's own social skills are more predictive of sorting into a social task intensive occupation when they exhibit majority group speech patterns. At the macro level, we show descriptive evidence that, since 1980, women, black Americans, and Latin American immigrants in the U.S. have been more likely to work in social task intensive occupations in areas where their own group has higher labor market representation. Consistent with this, these groups respond more to social skill demand shocks in labor markets where they are more populous.

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 substantial groundwork laid by researchers. In this paper, we study the labor market competition between academia and industry for AI researchers. Consistent with academia and industry increasingly rewarding the same talent, we find that over the past decade, publications in AI-related conferences are more predictive of employment in industry vis-à-vis academia. We also provide causal evidence via a (reweighted) difference-in-differences design, exploiting data from a leading AI conference that publicly releases submissions and referee reports. On average, a publication increases the chance of moving to a top firm by 2-6 percentage points in the next 1-3 years. Sorting to top firms is stronger for males in academia, whereas female students and postdocs are more likely to get tenure-track positions following a successful publication. Researchers who move to industry are subsequently less productive in publishing than academics, suggesting that an increasing concentration of talent in industry could compromise the efficiency of research production.

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.