See below for my publications and recent worker papers. Find my CV here.
"Firms' Choices of Wage-Setting Protocols", with Christopher Flinn - pdf (R&R at Review of Economic Studies )
This is an update of a previously circulated draft: Firms' Choices of Wage-Setting Protocols in the Presence of Minimum Wages" - link to old version In this paper we study a frictional labor market where firms that bargain and renegotiate wages compete with firms that post non-negotiable wage offers. We derive - and empirically validate - a testable prediction from the model regarding the cross-sectional prevalence of bargaining and renegotiation of wage among workers. We estimate a quantitative version of the model and use it to assess the contribution of differences in wage-setting practices to overall wage inequality and wage gaps by gender and education.
"Designing Cash Transfers in the Presence of Children's Human Capital Formation" - pdf (2nd round at the Journal of Political Economy )
Previously circulated as "Improving Child Outcomes through Welfare Reform" Using a model of maternal labor supply and investment in children, I show that accounting for the human capital develoment of children has a big effect on the optimal size and shape of cash transfers to households with children. The model provides a tractable outcome equation in which a policy's effect on child skills can be understood through its impact on two economic resources in the household - time and money - and the share of each resource as factors in the production of skills. These key causal parameters are cleanly identified by policy variation through the 1990s. The model also admits simple and interpretable formulae for optimal nonlinear transfers in the style of Mirrlees (1971), with novel features arising when child skill formation is accounted for. Using a broadly conservative empirical strategy, estimates imply that optimal transfers are about 20% more generous than the US benchmark, and shaped very differently.
"Family Law Effects on Divorce, Fertility, and Child Investment", with Meta Brown and Christopher Flinn - pdf (R&R at Journal of Labor Economics )
In this project we develop a model in which married couples make decisions regarding divorce, fertility, and time investment in their children. The model is dynamic and noncooperative, and the solution concept is Markov Perfect Equilibrium. We estimate the model using data on time investment, fertility, and divorce, from the PSID. Along the margin of indifference between divorce and marriage, divorce has heterogeneous effects on children. Thus, various "promarital" policies can have positive or negative developmental impacts on children.
"Frictional Adjustment to Income Tax Incentives: An Application to the Earned Income Tax Credit", with Antonella Mancino - pdf (R&R at Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics )
In this paper we look for evidence of hours constraints and search frictions in the response of single mothers to the Earned Income Tax Credit. We fit our evidence to a structural model and use this to explore positive and normative implications.
"A Structural Meta-analysis of Welfare Reform Experiments and Their Impacts on Children" - pdf (resubmitted to Journal of Political Economy )
Using a model of maternal labor supply and investment in children, this paper synthesizes the findings from three separate welfare reform experiments across six sites. The proposed model maps variation in experimental design to parameters that define labor supply behavior, child care use, and the importance of time and money in the development of child skills. The estimation procedure, which aggregates available evidence to identify the model’s key causal parameters, amounts to a structural meta- analysis.
"Child skill production: Accounting for parental and market-based time and goods investments", with Elizabeth Caucutt, Lance Lochner, and Youngmin Park - pdf, appendix (resubmitted to Journal of Political Economy )
Families invest parental time, home goods/services, and market-based child care in their children. We study these investments, focusing on two issues: the role of parental human capital and the substitutability of inputs in the skill production process. We develop a relative demand estimation strategy that uses intratemporal optimality to estimate input substitutability, as well as the relative productivity of inputs and the role played by parental education. This approach requires only a weak separability assumption on the dynamics of skills, no data on skills, and easily addresses measurement error in inputs. We show how relative demand restrictions can simplify estimation of the dynamics of skill production using (noisy) measures of skills when there are multiple investment inputs that are imperfectly measured. Finally, we show how moments related to relative demand can be combined with moments related to skill dynamics to determine whether beliefs about skill production align with the true technology. Using data from the Child Development Supplement of the PSID, we estimate the skill production technology for children ages 12 and younger, finding moderately strong complementarity between inputs. We estimate little effect of parental education on the child production technology: more-educated parents invest more, because they have higher incomes and stronger preference for children’s skills. Counterfactual simulations show that the degree of input complementarity we estimate has important implications for policies that subsidize specific inputs or provide free child care.
"Labor Market Search and Schooling Investment", with Christopher Flinn, International Economic Review 50 (May 2015) - pdf