Working Papers

The Reversal of the Gender Education Gap with Economic Development (with Jie Ren and Michelle Rendall) - Apr 2025

press coverage: VoxEU, VoxDev, Faulti Interview

Using household surveys covering 83 countries of all income levels, we document that the gender education gap in low-income countries is strikingly large and that it narrows and reverses with economic development. To study the driving forces, we propose a three-sector model in which development features skill-biased technological change, structural change, gender-biased technological change (a reduced form of changing discrimination), changing marriage markets, and varying levels of home productivity. The model is parameterized to match contrasting labor market outcomes by education and gender groups and it does well in matching the patterns of the gender education gap we document. Counterfactual exercises show that the complementarity between skill-biased technological change and structural change explains most of the narrowing gender education gap across the development spectrum. 

Automation and Gender: Implications for Occupational Segregation and the Gender Skill Gap

(with Patricia Cortes, Nicolas Guida-Johnson, and Jessica Pan)  - June 2025

Revise & Resubmit, 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.

Firm Life-Cycle Learning and Misallocation - Apr 2024

Conditionally 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.