Research:

Unemployment Insurance and Family Labor Supply (Job Market Paper)        Link to the paper 

Unemployment insurance (UI) duration is known to affect the recipients, but does it also affect their families? I provide the first evidence on how family members across different relationships adjust their labor supply when an unemployed individual becomes entitled to UI of longer duration. Using Dutch administrative data, I exploit sharp discontinuities in maximum UI entitlement duration in a regression discontinuity design. As a direct effect of the policy, longer entitlement raises actual UI benefit duration and delays exit from unemployment. In response, spouses increase employment by about 3 percentage points; adult children increase employment by about 5 percentage points. Parents, on the other hand, do not increase employment when their unemployed children receive longer UI entitlement. Accounting for these family spillovers raises the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF) by 6%, suggesting that ignoring family labor supply responses understates the value of UI extension policies.  

The Hidden Cost of Rest: Mandatory Breaks and Women’s Working Hours  (jointly with Michele Tertilt and Sena Coskun)    Link to the paper 

Women around the world work fewer hours than men. We propose a novel reason for low hours in Germany related to mandatory rest breaks. Mandatory breaks add kinks to budget constraints if workers do not value breaks at work equally to leisure at home. Such kinks can affect optimal hours worked. To study the effect empirically, we exploit a 1994 reform in Germany that moved the point at which women are required to take a break from 4.5 hours to 6 hours of continuous work. Our empirical strategy uses Mikrozensus data to compare the hours worked by women before and after the reform with those of men and with a control group of women that was not affected by the reform. We find that, on average, working hours decreased for women affected by the reform, driven primarily by married women. We reconcile these findings with a theoretical framework in which the direction of the hours response depends on a worker's starting point on the budget constraint before the reform and the shape of her indifference curve. Married women respond more because they tend to start at lower hours and have a more elastic labor supply.  This is, to our knowledge, the first paper to examine the labor supply implications of mandatory rest break regulation.

Part-time Work Policies and Older Workers’ Employment: Evidence from German Mini-jobs    Link to the paper 

This paper studies how part-time work policies shape bridge employment and retirement transitions among older workers, using the 2003 German Mini-job reform as a natural experiment. The reform raised the Mini-job earnings threshold from 325 to 400 Euros per month and abolished the weekly hours cap. Exploiting variation in the age at which different birth cohorts were exposed to the reform, I implement a cohort difference-in-differences design using administrative data from the German Pension Fund. Rather than reducing unemployment or extending working lives as intended, the reform induced older workers to switch from regular to marginal employment without social security contributions, increasing marginal employment by 1.2 percentage points, and accelerated full pension claiming. The shift to marginal employment was driven primarily by women and low-attachment workers, while reductions in unemployment were concentrated among low-income older workers. The findings suggest that part-time work policies may accelerate labor market exit among older workers rather than prolong their participation.

Work in progress:

Mass layoffs and labor supply across generations

Beyond the family: unemployment insurance and peer spillovers