The goal of this study is to understand the welfare consequences from long-term skill mismatches due to childbirth and how maternity leave policies can help alleviate such mismatches. This research focuses on job match quality between men and women through joint decision-making, and its contribution to the gender wage gap. While the gender wage gap has been studied in relation to occupation or sector type, the job match paradigm within the context of household decision-making is less understood. Findings will be relevant to discussions of effective federal paid leave policies, among others.

This research explores how maternity leave affects mothers and their children. Much of the work on paid maternity leave in the United States has focused on the labor supply effect for women, with a small literature on health effects for children. Using a set of linked administrative data from the state of Rhode Island, this project will examine a more extensive set of outcomes for both mothers and children. In addition, the research will look at maternal and child outcomes for individuals across the income distribution, providing needed nuance to assess various policy options.

This team of young, promising applied economists seeks to quantify how public assistance affects households’ financial well-being through increasing access to credit. We know little about the interactions between social safety net programs and the financial well-being of families. This paper uses a credible and proven research design to provide new evidence to better our understanding of the role of credit markets in the lives of the poor. By matching individual credit data to administrative data, the authors will estimate the effects of removing low-income youth with disabilities from Supplemental Security Income on credit access, secured borrowing, and payday loan borrowing for the youth and their families. There is great interest in this broad subject, and precious few ways to tease out causal impacts. Yet with cutting-edge methods and use of administrative data, the authors will attempt to do so.

This project seeks to contribute to the literature on the impact of large-scale, publicly-funded preschool education programs on a variety of health and developmental outcomes for children ages 4 to 12. While numerous studies exist on the effects of attending Head Start, there is a dearth of research on state pre-K programs even though they are currently the largest provider of preschool education in the United States. State-funded pre-K programs have been expanding since the 1990s and the calls for universal pre-K continue. This project promises to add useful data to those discussions.

Building on recent work in labor economics focused on the role of firms, this research seeks to shed light on the importance of firms specifically in the careers of young workers. Using administrative matched employer-employee data, the researcher seeks to document facts regarding access to high-wage firms and movements between high- and low-wage firms over the span of a worker’s career. This has the potential to improve our understanding of cohort inequality as well as potential scarring effects of recessions.

This project will study the school-to-work transitions and subsequent earnings of Texas high school students. This project will focus on some of Texas’ most socially and economically excluded populations—those living in substandard housing settlements found in unincorporated areas outside Texas border cities. This research will shed light on the efficacy of potential education and workforce interventions to assist impoverished student populations.