It is widely believed that the presence of a large informal sector increases the efficiency cost of social programs - transfer and social insurance programs - in developing countries. We evaluate such claims for policies that have been heavily studied in countries with low informality -...

The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 11.4 million undocumented persons reside in the United States. Congress and President Obama are considering a number of proposals to regularize the status of the undocumented population and provide a "path to citizenship." Any future change in...

This research is the first to identify the impact of armed conflict exposure for the average male randomly drawn from the population on subsequent intimate partner violence (IPV). We exploit a population-level natural experiment in service location assignment of draftees under Turkey's universal...

We provide the first systematic account of summer declines in women's labor market activity. From May to July, the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age US women declines by 1.1 percentage points, whereas male employment rises; women's total hours worked fall by 9.8 percent, more than...

This paper builds a world atlas of child penalties in employment based on micro data from 134 countries. The estimation of child penalties is based on pseudo-event studies of first child birth using cross-sectional data. The pseudo-event studies are validated against true event studies using...

We study the effects of job-protected leave policies on intergenerational mobility, long-run child outcomes, and parental decisions (labor market, investments in children, and fertility). We merge rich sources of historical information on family leave policies across the United States since 1973...

Employment and participation rates for US prime age women rose steadily during the second half of the 20th century. In the last 30 years, however, those rates stagnated, even as employment and participation rates for women in other industrialized countries continued to rise. I discuss the role...

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20-64 years old, as of mid 2023, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s that we estimate in time-use data. We...

Billions of women still face legal barriers to economic inclusion, yet it is unclear whether lifting these barriers is sufficient to enhance their economic participation. We conduct a field experiment to quantify the impact of a major legal reform - the lifting of the Saudi women's driving ban -...

This paper examines the multigenerational impact of children and whether the public provision of formal childcare lessens the earnings and employment impacts of children. We find that the arrival of a firstborn reduces employment and earnings of mothers and employment of grandmothers. Studying a...