Working Papers

Health Womanpower: The Role of Federal Policy in Women's Entry into Medicine (Job Market Paper)

During the 1970s, women’s representation in medical schools grew rapidly from 9.6% of all students in 1970 to 26.5% in 1980. This paper studies the role of federal policy in increasing women’s access to medical training through two distinct channels: pressure to curb sex discrimination in admissions and a massive expansion in total enrollment through Health Manpower policy starting in 1963. To study this, I construct a novel school-by-year data set with enrollment and application information from 1960 through 1980. Using a continuous difference- in-differences design, I find that medical schools respond to the threat of losing federal contracts by increasing first year enrollment of women by 4 seats at the mean, which explains 27% of women’s gains between 1970 and 1973. Further, I provide OLS evidence that year-to-year expansions explain around 40% of women’s gains from 1970 to 1980; I verify this result in a synthetic control case study to identify the increase in women’s enrollment resulting from large jumps in capacity. 

How the 1963 Equal Pay Act and 1964 Civil Rights Act Shaped the Gender Gap in Pay

 (Revisions requested at Quarterly Journal of Economics, joint with Martha Bailey and Bryan Stuart)

In the 1960s, two landmark statutes—the Equal Pay and Civil Rights Acts—targeted the long-standing practice of employment discrimination against U.S. women. In their aftermath, the gender gap in median earnings among full-time, full-year workers remained stable for 15 years, leading many scholars to conclude the legislation was ineffectual. This paper revisits this conclusion using variation in legislative incidence across states and occupation-industry-state job classifications. We find that women’s wages grew by 4-12 percent more on average in places or jobs where the legislation was more binding, with the effects concentrated among the lowest-wage employees. We find no evidence of short-term changes in employment but some suggestive evidence that firms reduced their hiring of women in the long-term.

Firm Provision of Parental Leave in Competitive Equilibrium

The United States guarantees considerably less parental leave than most other OECD countries. The federal government requires covered employers to provide only 12 weeks of job protected unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act but does not require private sector employers to provide any paid wage replacement. As a result, provision of this benefit is largely based on the decision of individual firms. This paper presents a theoretical reason for why firms might offer parental leave: avoiding potentially large hiring costs by retaining an existing worker. I begin by presenting a standard undirected labor search model on parental leave. I show that this model can be extended to model the firm decision to provide leave and some form of wage replacement. I then construct a novel directed search model of parental leave with worker heterogeneity in their desired length of leave. I solve a full information setting where workers and firms can write contracts conditional on worker type, showing that leave is always provided above some threshold of worker type, cost of hiring a new worker relative to having a worker on leave.

Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications

Changes in the US Gender Gap in Wages in the 1960s

(AEA Papers and Proceedings, 111: 143-148, 2021; Joint with Martha Bailey and Bryan Stuart)

COVID-19 and stay-at-home orders: identifying event study designs with imperfect testing

(COVID Economics, 76: 23 April 2021, joint with Jaedo Choi, Elird Haxhiu, Nishaad Rao and Taeuk Seo)

This paper estimates the dynamic effect of Stay-At-Home (SAH) orders on the transmission of COVID-19 in the United States. Identification in this setting is challenging due to differences between real and reported case data given the imperfect testing environment, as well as the clearly non-random adoption of treatment. We extend a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model from Epidemiology to account for endogenous testing at the county level, and exploit this additional structure to recover identification. With the inclusion of model-derived sufficient statistics and fixed effects, SAH orders have a large and sustained negative effect on the growth of cases under plausible assumptions about the progression of testing. Point estimates range from a 44% to 54% reduction in the growth rate of cases one month after a SAH order. We conclude with a discussion on extending the methodology to later phases of the pandemic.

Works in Progress

Low Dose or No Dose? Continuous Treatment Difference-in-Differences with Unknown Controls (Joint with Elird Haxhiu)