Presentations: FRB Boston (July '24), FRB Philadelphia (Sept. '24), Boston University (Nov. '24), Bentley University (Dec. '24), PhD-EVS (Jan. '25), Midwest Economics Association (March '25)
This paper explores how differences in job search behavior and preferences contribute to the gender wage gap. Using data from the Job Search Supplement of the Survey of Consumer Expectations, I find that women are more likely to search for jobs and do so more intensively than men. Despite differential search inputs, men and women receive a similar number of job offers, implying a lower job offer yield for women. Women's best job offer has lower wages and hours, and fewer fringe benefits. Women are more sensitive to nonwage features of a job, such as commute time, hours worked, and location of a job. Lastly, women are more likely to search only for part-time work and have not worked in recent years. Building on these findings, I develop an on-the-job search model with endogenous search effort. I allow jobs to differ in their wage and amenity value. I incorporate the incidence of children and parental leave into the model, as the empirical facts show this is an important mechanism accounting for differences in search behavior, preferences, and labor force attachment by gender. Through the lens of the model I find that gender differences in amenity valuation can explain close to 20% of the overall gender wage gap.
Why do some occupations pay increasingly more than others over time? To answer this question, I combine hand-collected historical labor market data with a theory-guided accounting framework that allows me to decompose occupational wage inequality into two groups of explanations: productivity and rent sharing. In order to implement this decomposition, I use an equilibrium model of search and matching to derive a mapping from unobserved wage markdowns due to search frictions into a set of measurable labor market statistics for each occupation. I find that productivity, as opposed to rent sharing, explains most of the occupational wage inequality, both in the cross section and over time.
Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics, 2024, Vol 3(2024-4) Cleaned May CPS data. Cleaned MORG CPS data.
This paper successfully replicates Autor et al. (2008) and extends their analysis through 2022. The extension to an additional 17 years of analysis underscores the original finding that rising wage inequality was not an episodic event of the 1980s. That being said, overall 90/10 inequality and the college wage premium have plateaued since 2005. Despite overall inequality plateauing, upper-tail 90/50 inequality has continued to increase since 1980 for both men and women. I also find that the composition-adjusted real wages of high school dropouts has caught up with high school graduates in the last decade. Between 2012 and 2022, high school dropouts saw larger real wage gains than any other education group. The combination of these findings is consistent with rising polarization in which employment and wages expand for high-wage and low-wage work.
with Luma Ramos, Kevin Gallagher, Irene Monasterolo, Climate Policy, 2021, Vol 22(3): 371–388
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been tasked with quickly devising a climate change strategy that helps its members meet collective climate change and development goals while maintaining financial stability. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework of the ‘macro-critical’ nature of climate change and use that framework to examine the extent to which the IMF has incorporated the macro-economic aspects of climate change in recent years. We deploy textual analysis algorithms to perform a baseline analysis of the extent to which the IMF’s main bilateral surveillance activities—Article IV reports and Financial Sector Assessment Programs (FSAPs)—have focused on climate risks between 2017 and 2021. We find that IMF surveillance activity has paid little and uneven attention to climate risks in Article IV reports, and even less so in FSAPs. However, recent Article IV and FSAP assessments have piloted climate risk analyses that present an opportunity to be expanded and incorporated systematically. The analytical framework, baseline analysis, and methodology will allow future analysts to monitor IMF climate performance over time.
with Vikram Dixit
We build a dataset of historical job advertisements from a U.S. newspaper of record that spans most of the 20th century. We measure gender bias at the occupation, skill, and firm level. We find that ads for jobs with task requirements that are people-facing are the most gendered. We interpret these facts through the lens of a task model of occupational sorting to quantify the effect of discrimination.
with Nils Lehr
We depart from the competitive labor market setting of the task model. To do so, we extend the framework Helpman et al. (2010) by incorporating the task-based framework following Acemoglu and Autor (2011). Our model offers new insights into the effects of automation, task allocation, and search frictions for labor market outcomes.
I document trends in the large-firm wage premium across 26 European countries and the United States using Eurostat's Structure of Earnings Survey, a harmonized dataset with detailed information on employers and workers. For the U.S., I draw on two microdatasets from the BLS: the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, and Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Based on a model of labor market frictions and differing workforce composition at firms, I quantify the role of an aging workforce to country differences in the large-firm wage premium.