Research

We study the labor market impact of unplanned pregnancy among women using long-acting reversible contraceptives to delay pregnancy. While most women successfully delay, some have unplanned pregnancies, providing quasi-random variation in pregnancy timing. Analyzing linked health and labor market data from Sweden, we find that unplanned pregnancies halt women's career progression, resulting in income losses of 19% five years later. We find similar effects of unplanned births among women using short-acting reversible contraceptives. Using pregnancy as an instrument for birth in a dynamic treatment effect framework, effects of unplanned children are more detrimental for younger women and those enrolled in education.

This paper provides the first causal evidence that gender affects the information an individual receives about careers. We conduct a large-scale field experiment in which real college students seek career information from 10,000 working professionals. We randomize whether a professional receives a message from a male or a female student. When students ask broadly for information about a career, female students receive substantially more information on work/life balance than male students. This gender difference persists when students specifically ask about work/life balance. A survey of professionals suggests non-altruistic motives for discussing work/life balance with women. Combining findings from the field experiment and results from an information intervention, we conclude that gender gaps in information received about work/life balance are consequential for gender gaps in career choice.

This study examines the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling which removed federal protections for abortion on contraceptive and sterilization decisions. Using health insurance records of millions of Americans, we find that the ruling led to an increase of 20% in the monthly rate of female sterilization procedures, 17% increase in male sterilization procedures, and a 15% increase LARC insertions in states hostile to abortion compared to other states in the months immediately following the ruling. For most subgroups we study, effects fade by 2023. However, we find lasting effects on sterilization rates for individuals aged 18-25.

We study the role of amenities in explaining the gender wage gap by linking Danish firm-level data on amenity provision to administrative earnings records. We supplement this with an incentive-compatible preference elicitation survey measuring workers' willingness to pay for specific job attributes. We first document gender differences in hours, scheduling, and commuting distance. We show that many of these gender differences expand after parenthood. We show that after parenthood, women move toward firms with lower wage premia, but these shifts largely disappear once we control for firm-level amenities. We then estimate willingness to pay for amenities using an incentivized hypothetical preference elicitation survey. We find that women strongly dislike evening and on-call work and value proximity to home and schedule flexibility for family reasons. This means that the gender gap in compensation is 38\% smaller when we include the value to workers of amenities related to temporal and spacial flexibility, relative to when we only measure monetary earnings.

We study how the rise of remote work has changed childcare use and gender inequality in the labor market. Using newly available administrative tax data on childcare arrangements in the United States, we document that paid childcare has fallen by roughly 10 percent since the pre-Covid period, despite persistently high maternal labor force participation. The decline is broad-based across child ages, largest for higher-income households, and closely matches survey-based measures. A decomposition shows that mothers' access to remote work accounts for more than half of this decline, far outweighing other observed factors such as fathers' characteristics, universal pre-k expansions, grandparental caregiving, platform work, and childcare-sector supply conditions. We next identify two distinct channels through which remote work affects households. First, we study the effect of being at a firm that allows remote work. Linking firm remote-work policies to the administrative tax records, we show that parents exposed to remote-work firms are less likely to use paid childcare than comparable parents exposed to in-person firms. However, remote work does not improve mothers' earnings relative to non-mothers and thus does not reduce the gender wage gap; if anything, fathers benefit more from the potential to work remotely. Second, using plausibly random variation in school-entry cutoffs around age 5 relative to children's birth dates, we show that when children leave the home for school, earnings rise for mothers in remote work-friendly occupations who had previously been using little paid childcare. There was no effect of school eligibility on mother's earnings in the years before the remote-work era among similar mothers. Together, the results suggest that remote work has reduced paid childcare use by allowing parents to substitute toward caring for children while working, but that this substitution offsets potential career gains for mothers.

Using Danish matched employer-employee data, I compare the relative pay of men and women to their relative productivity as measured by production function estimation. I find that the gender "productivity gap" is 8 percent, implying that almost two thirds of the residual gender wage gap is due to productivity differences between men and women. Motherhood plays an important role, yet it also reveals a puzzle: the pay gap for mothers is entirely explained by productivity, whereas the gap for non-mothers is not. In addition, the decoupling of pay and productivity for women without children happens during their prime-child bearing years. These estimates are robust to a variety of specifications for the impact of observables on productivity, and robust to accounting for endogenous sorting of women into less productive firms using a control-function approach. This paper also provides estimates of the productivity gap across industries and occupations, finding the same general patterns for mothers compared to women without children within these subgroups.

It is common for mentorship programs to use race, gender, and nationality to match mentors and mentees. Despite the popularity of these programs, there is little evidence on whether mentees value mentors with shared traits. Using novel administrative data from an online college mentoring platform connecting students and alumni, we document that female students indeed disproportionately reach out to female mentors. To disentangle whether this observed homophily is explained by taste-based or statistical discrimination, we implement a preference elicitation survey paired with an within-survey experiment. We find that homophily is entirely explained by a lack of information on mentor quality. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of initiatives that match on shared traits.

We document the declining gap between the average earnings of women and men in Denmark from 1980 to 2010. The decline in the earnings gap is driven by increases in hours worked by women as well as a decline in the gender wage gap. The data show a great deal of segregation across education tracks, occupations, and even workplaces, but this segregation has declined since 1980. These changes in segregation have been accompanied by a reduction in the role of observables in explaining the gender wage gap. The residual gender wage gap has been constant since 1980. The hours gap is not affected by changes in segregation at the occupation and education level: differences in these characteristics for women relative to men do not contribute to the hours gap in 2010 and they did not in 1980. However, a firm-worker fixed effects analysis suggests that 30 percent of the gender hours gap can be explained by the sorting of women into lower-hours workplaces. The hours gap is driven by mothers, the group for whom differences in employer, occupation, education, and experience also imply large differences in wages. The combined effect of hours and wages is a more than 20 percent gender earnings gap among well-attached (halftime-plus) workers between 25 and 60 years old, 10 percent of which cannot be explained by differences in hours, or in the readily observable characteristics of these workers.

Gender differences in professional networks have been shown to contribute to men’s and women’s disparate labor market outcomes. This gap could be due to differences in network access, differences in network usage, or both. Using novel administrative data from a student-alumni professional networking website, we study gender differences in student network usage, holding network access fixed. Focusing on messages sent by students to alumni, we document that male and female students network similarly, both in terms of the number of messages sent and the specific questions asked. Furthermore, there are only small gender differences in question tone.

This paper examines aggregate time series data on individual charitable donations from 1968 to 2007. We find that changes in individual giving show an asymmetric response to changes in the S&P 500: individuals are more responsive to stock market upturns than downturns.

This paper studies the effects of parental leave on firms by examining a 2002 Danish reform which increased the length of fully-compensated parental leave by 22 weeks. Because the policy change imposed no direct costs on firms, was retroactively applied and unanticipated, it offers a unique setting in which to study the effects of major expansions of paid parental leave. The expansion has a negative effect on firm survival and the retention of mothers. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no effect of the reform on coworker earnings in the short or long run, but there is evidence of stress on coworkers in other dimensions: coworkers who change jobs have lower earnings in the short run as a result of the policy change and some coworkers delay children.

In this paper, we present the results of a natural field experiment in which workers operated telephones soliciting funds for a major charity in the US. We find that incentives increase targeted performance at the cost of other dimensions of a worker's task. Incentivized workers were paid for the fraction of pledges-promises to donate at a later date-which they secured. Pledges were 50% higher for callers paid a commission relative to callers paid a flat rate. However actual donations (excluding outliers) were 17% lower when a donor was called by a caller paid a commission rather than a flat rate. Incentives also caused workers to break the rules of their employment in order to increase their pay. Commission-based pay caused rule-breaking to nearly double. Finally, in our experiment, workers with different types of compensation worked at the same time and could observe one another's performance. We use the randomization-induced variation in worker performance to study whether incentives benefit firms via peer-effects. We find no evidence that productivity increases spill over onto peers, however, we find that rule-breaking generated by incentives does spill over onto peers.