Yimei Zou

Working Papers

• The Growth Implications of Women's Reproductive Freedom

Abstract: I study the growth and welfare implications of women’s reproductive freedom, defined as the ability to control the timing and incidence of childbearing. I develop and quantify a continuous-time overlapping-generations growth model in which women choose fertility over the life cycle as a stochastic dynamic decision, subject to reproductive aging, contraception effectiveness, and child penalties on human capital accumulation. The irreversibility of motherhood makes first births qualitatively different from subsequent births and creates an age-dependent incentive to delay entry into motherhood. In equilibrium, individual fertility choices shape the joint distribution of population over age and income, while endogenous intergenerational human capital spillovers generate sustained growth in output per capita. Calibrating the model to U.S. data from 1961–2019, I show that the post-1961 improvements in contraception effectiveness account for 44% of the increase in female labor supply and 32% of the rise in female labor productivity during this period. Aggregate welfare gains from these improvements amount to 28–37% of lifetime consumption, depending on the social discount rate. Projections further show that, conditional on the same long-run population growth target, policies that reduce motherhood career penalties dominate restrictions on reproductive freedom in terms of productivity and welfare.

• Endogenous Production Networks and Gains from Trade

Publication

• “Urban Networks: Connecting Markets, People and Ideas”, with Edward Glaeser and Giacomo Ponzetto, Papers in Regional Science, 95 (1), 2016, 17–59