Research
Research
I investigate the effects of paid family leave (PFL) policies, focusing on the demand side of the labor market. Utilizing a dataset containing the near-universe of online job postings, I examine whether and to what extent PFL policies influence employers' hiring behaviors. Using a stacked Difference-in-Difference method, I find that PFL policies significantly affect employers' labor demand, and the impacts are different across full-time and part-time labor markets. First, PFL policies lead to lower posted pay, particularly with full-time job posts. Second, employers adjust the gendered language used in their job advertisements to become more masculine, especially for part-time jobs. Such language change suggests that PFL policies lead to gender discrimination, at least to the extent that employers use more masculine language to discourage female job applicants. Lastly, after the PFL benefit begins, the number of overall job ads and the number of part-time job ads decrease. The share of full-time job ads decreases in female-dominated occupations, while increases in male-dominated occupations.
Presentation:
Canadian Economics Association Conference, 2024
Western Economic Association International Annual Conference, 2024
Southern Economic Association Annual Meeting, 2024
Global GLO-JOPE Conference, 2024
Fairfield University, 2024
with Robert M. Hunt and Konstantinos Serfes
We develop a two-sided model of the payment card market, featuring novel elements, such as detailed demand, merchant competition, and competing networks with ad valorem pricing for interchange fees and rewards. A network imposes taxes for credit card and cash users influenced by these prices. We are examining the effect of product market competition, network competition and access to credit on these taxes. We highlight the ''elasticity effect'', related to demand subconvexity, and the ''competition effect''. Enhanced network competition, when networks are differentiated and so the elasticity effect dominates, leads to higher credit card taxes and merchant prices, reducing welfare. Conversely, with minimal differentiation, intense competition for cardholders, due to stronger network competition, lowers the tax and enhances welfare.
with Ricardo Serrano-Padial
We study whether changes in the menu of available contracts have a differential impact on male and female contract choices. To measure such differences in menu effects we design a two-stage experiment with real-effort tasks that vary in pay and duration. Each contract involves a series of appointments throughout the day at which individuals must complete the tasks, from a single appointment to spanning a typical full-time workday. In the first stage, we elicit reservation wages from participants as a function of the number of appointments. In the next stage, participants choose their most preferred contracts from various menus. The data on reservation wages are used in the second stage to create personalized contracts and menus for each participant. We find major differences in menu effects across gender. Men tend to exhibit a stronger bias towards high-pay long contracts than women, whereas women tend to exhibit a bigger tendency to choose a contract with average features (compromise effect) and their choices are more sensitive to the inclusion of inferior contracts (attraction effect).
with Kamyar Kamyar and Tristan Potter
Employers commonly solicit information from prospective employees on their past wages or salaries prior to making an offer. We use data from the near universe of job listings posted directly on companies’ websites between 2017 and 2024 to analyze the effect of recent state- and city-level bans on this practice. We find strong evidence that such bans (i) substantially increase average posted wages, (ii) substantially in- crease the share of job ads that explicitly list a wage or wage range (as opposed to not specifying a wage), (iii) do not appear to significantly affect the number of job postings. Moreover, such bans appear to have no effect on salaries, suggesting that the policy is primarily operative in lower-pay labor markets.