Research
Working Papers
"The Search for Parental Leave and the Early-Career Gender Wage Gap"
New Draft (December 2024)
Online Appendix (December 2024)
[Revision requested - Journal of Labor Economics]
Gender differences in preferences for parental leave contribute to the early-career growth in the gender wage gap among highly educated millennial Americans. Estimating a hedonic ob-search model, I show that, while both men and women experience wage growth by entering firms offering better pay and benefits, the wage gap increases as women accept lower wages upon receiving job offers from employers providing parental leave. The wage-gap growth could decline by 60\% if preferences for paid parental leave did not differ by gender. It could also decline if mandating and subsidizing the provision of paid leave muted workers' leave-wage trade-off.
“The Underworked American? Explaining the Rise and Fall in Long Workweeks”
[New draft available soon]
I document that work-hours have been increasing in the United States between the 1980s and the mid-1990s, before steadily declining until the end of the 2010s. These trends were predominantly driven by secular changes in the share of young, salaried employees working long hours (more than 40 hours per week) in high-pay jobs. Using a Gicheva (2013)-type model where long work-hours increase young workers’ promotion probabilities in career-oriented jobs, I show that the inverted U-shaped trend in overtime work can be explained by changes in labor demand that increased (in the 1980s-1990s) and decreased (in the 2000s- 2010s) the life-cycle wage premia that young employees expect to obtain when supplying overtime work hours. In the model, changes to the life-cycle wage premia from working long hours also result into changes in the spread of permanent income across employees supplying different amounts of work-hours. I then estimate long-run trends in persistent and transitory wage dispersion and show that persistent wage dispersion grew in the 1980s and 1990s and declined thereafter. Thus, the increase and decline of life-cycle wage premia for working long hours reconcile the inverted U-shaped trends both in overtime work and in persistent wage dispersion. These results are suggestive that, after surging in the 1980s and 1990s, the “fortunes of the youth” (Beaudry, Green & Sand 2014) may have been declining later on, due to shifts in labor demand that flattened the life-cycle wage profiles that young, salaried employees can obtain when supplying long work-hours.