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(with Patricia Cortes, Nicolas Guida-Johnson, and Jessica Pan) - Sep 2025
(with Patricia Cortes, Nicolas Guida-Johnson, and Jessica Pan) - Sep 2025
Accepted, Journal of Labor Economics
We examine the differential effects of automation on the labor market and educational outcomes of women relative to men over the past four decades. Although women were disproportionately employed in occupations with a high risk of automation in 1980, they were more likely to shift to high-skill, high-wage occupations than men over time. We provide a causal link by exploiting variation in local labor market exposure to automation attributable to historical differences in local industry structure. For a given change in the exposure to automation across commuting zones, women were more likely than men to shift out of routine task-intensive occupations to high-skill, high wage occupations over the subsequent decade. The net effect is that initially routine-intensive local labor markets experienced greater occupational gender integration. College attainment among younger workers, particularly women, also rose significantly more in areas more exposed to automation. We propose a model of occupational choice with endogenous skill investments, where social skills and routine tasks are q-complements, and women have a comparative advantage in social skills, to explain the observed patterns. Supporting the model mechanisms, areas with greater exposure to automation experienced a greater movement of women into occupations with high social skill (and high cognitive) requirements than men.
Accepted, The Review of Economics and Statistics
Dispersion in marginal revenue products of capital (MRPK) across firms may lower aggregate productivity through misallocation. Using firm-level panel data from China, I document that MRPK dispersion decreases substantially with firm age, particularly before age five. Building on this novel fact, I propose a new interpretation of MRPK dispersion as resulting from firm life-cycle learning. To formalize this idea, I develop a quantitative model in which firms learn about their fundamental productivity as they age in a frictional market with endogenous exits. I find that omitting learning can lead to considerable overestimation of TFP losses from distortions correlated with productivity.
The Economic Journal, 2024, 134 (658): 614–647.
press coverage: VoxDev. [Replication package]
We draw on household survey data from countries of all income levels and document that average unemployment rates increase with GDP per capita. This is accounted for almost entirely by low-rather than high-educated workers. We interpret these facts in a model with frictional labor markets, a traditional self-employment sector, skill-biased productivity differences across countries, and unemployment benefits that become more generous with development. A calibrated version of the model does well in explaining the cross-country patterns we document. Counterfactual exercises point to skill-biased productivity differences as the most important factor in explaining the cross-country unemployment patterns.
Journal of Development Economics, 2023, 162: 103046.
Financial frictions adversely affect productivity by discouraging entrepreneurship, which is often measured by the self-employed. This paper distinguishes between own-account employment (self-employed without employees) and employers when studying this question. Using micro data for 77 countries from all income levels, we find almost universally negative selection on education into own-account status relative to wage workers and positive selection into employers. To quantify the effects of financial frictions, we introduce skill-biased productivity progress across countries in an occupational choice model. Our model predicts an average of 19% output gains in low-income countries from removing financial frictions. In contrast, an alternative model with skill-neutral technological change cannot match the high own-account employment share in low-income countries, thus overestimating the output gains by 13 percentage points.
Economics Letters, 2022, 210: 110190.
The age gap within marriage is one form of the gender gap. This paper uses micro data from 89 countries from all income levels to document that men marry women younger than themselves in all countries, and the age gap decreases with development.
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