Embedded Files
Job Market Paper
Co-Winner of Rosenstein-Rodan Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper, Boston University, 2023
Abstract: I examine the effect of a woman-friendly occupation on employment by exploring a unique historical setting -- the postmaster occupation during the early twentieth-century United States. Unlike many occupations that established practices to prevent married women from entering, postmasters were open to married women and offered flexible work arrangements and equal pay. With a novel dataset on postmaster appointments and census linking, I show that postmasters attracted qualified women who were not gainfully employed previously. However, the postmaster occupation offered women few benefits beyond the appointed term. Taking advantage of the fact that postmasters were presidential appointees and were rarely re-appointed after the party of the president changed, I compare the 1940 outcomes of women appointed just before and after the 1933 presidential transition in a regression discontinuity design. The RD estimates suggest that women experienced a 26.7 pp. reduction in gainful employment after finishing their postmaster term. I benchmark women's estimates against men's to show that the result is unlikely driven by selection bias. Finally, I show that women postmasters were not more likely to be employed than their women neighbors who had never been postmasters, despite their work experience. The lack of benefits for women's employment beyond the appointed term is in part explained by state-level discrimination against married women working and the severity of the Great Depression.
Other Working Paper(s)
Returns to Education for Women in the Mid-20th Century: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws [Draft]
Returns to Education for Women in the Mid-20th Century: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws [Draft]
Abstract: Women had a similar level of schooling to men during the mid-twentieth century United States, but research on the returns to education for women is scarce. Using compulsory schooling laws as instrumental variables, this paper examines the causal effect of education on women's labor market and marriage market outcomes. I examine both outcomes because women frequently traded off employment and marriage due to marriage bars and gender norms against married women working. I show that an additional year of schooling increases women's probability of gainful employment by 7.9 pp. and women's wage earnings by 15 percent, which can be explained by women's entry into skilled occupations. Given the large returns on earnings, education surprisingly does not increase women's probability of never marrying, but it does increase the probability of divorce and separation. In addition, women's education positively affects the husband's and the household's labor supply and earnings, conditional on marriage formation and the husband's education.
Work in Progress
Germ Theory at Home: The Role of Private Action in Reducing Child Mortality during the Epidemiological Transition (with James Feigenbaum and Lauren Hoehn-Velasco)
Germ Theory at Home: The Role of Private Action in Reducing Child Mortality during the Epidemiological Transition (with James Feigenbaum and Lauren Hoehn-Velasco)
Abstract: Did household health behaviors contribute to the epidemiological transition? In this paper, we study whether the dissemination of germ theory--which provided new methods of controlling infectious disease--enabled households to prevent child mortality. We focus on physician households, who, as a group, should have had the clearest informational shock after the availability of germ theory. Our analysis evaluates a well-cited claim that physicians' children died at similar rates to non-physicians' children before the discovery of germ theory, but not after. We use a novel measure of child mortality that follows young children over time by linking households between censuses. Leveraging this nearly century-long measure of child mortality, we find that germ theory enabled physician households to reduce child mortality by 1-2 percentage points, a 7-14% reduction. We also show that this reduction in child mortality after germ theory is unique to physician households and is not an artifact of income or education.
Rebuilding the State: Confederate Post Offices After the Civil War
Rebuilding the State: Confederate Post Offices After the Civil War
Gender Differences in Managerial Performance: Evidence from The Post Office
Gender Differences in Managerial Performance: Evidence from The Post Office
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