Research

Publications

Working Papers

In recent decades, the correlation between U.S. men’s wages and hours worked has reversed: low-wage men used to work the longest hours, whereas today it is men with the highest wages who work the most. This changing correlation accounts for roughly 30 percent of the rise in the variance of male earnings between 1975 and 2015. In this paper, we rationalize these trends in a model of joint household labor supply. Our quantitative model generates similar changes to what is observed in the data as a reaction to shifts in women’s education and labor supply, the gender gap, and assortative mating. Our model is consistent with the observations that the changing wage-hours correlation among men is driven by married men, and that there is little change in the wage-hours correlation among employed women and at the household level. The results suggest that taking into account joint household decision making is essential for understanding the dynamics of labor supply.

We study the evolving sectoral preferences of married and single U.S. women. The decomposition reveals significant differences between the two groups in sorting across industries and over time, particularly since the 1990s. While occupational sorting has converged, sectoral sorting has diverged. Married women show an increasing preference for safe industries. We construct a hypothetical gender wage gap assuming women share the preferences of men and face the same discrimination and find that falling discrimination against women was the key determinant closing the gender wage gap until the 1990s, while changing preferences of married women are responsible for further closing the gender wage gap since then.

In a number of European countries, unemployment rates for young college graduates are higher than for young high school graduates. This presents a challenge for canonical models of unemployment that suggest that unemployment should decrease with education. I disentangle two potential explanations for the pattern: “labor market frictions” versus “relative productivity.” Here, labor market frictions are obstacles to labor market flows (such as employment protection regulation), whereas relative productivity refers to features that lower the output of educated workers already matched to firms (such as an education system that does not provide the right skills or a lack of jobs that make good use of workers’ skills). The analysis builds on a search and matching model with endogeneous productivity differences and the possibility of mismatch (educated workers working in low skilled jobs). I show that when young educated workers have productivity levels close to uneducated workers, they have higher unemployment rates, because firms create fewer skilled jobs. My counterfactual analysis shows that the relative productivity channel is more important than the labor market frictions channel in accounting for unemployment of young educated workers. The results suggest that improving education policy and fostering firms’ demand for skills may have important roles to play in addressing high unemployment among young workers. 

This paper examines how the shift towards working from home during and after the Covid-19 pandemic shapes the way how labor market and locality choices interact. For our analysis, we combine large administrative data on employment biographies in Germany and a new working from home potential indicator based on comprehensive data on working conditions across occupations. We find that in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the distance between workplace and residence has increased more strongly for workers in occupations that can be done from home: The association of working from home potential and work-home distance increased significantly since 2021 as compared to a stable pattern before. The effect is much larger for new jobs, suggesting that people match to jobs with high working from home potential that are further away than before the pandemic. Most of this effect stems from jobs in big cities, which indicates that working from home alleviates constraints by tight housing markets. We find no significant evidence that commuting patterns changed more strongly for women than for men.