Research

This paper studies the macroeconomic consequences of large-scale family policies in a heterogeneous-agent overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and child investments, a multi-period demographic structure, and childcare choices. I find that cash rewards for childbirth raise fertility at the expense of human capital and intergenerational mobility in the long run. Meanwhile, average welfare rises as the old-age dependency ratio drops, leading to lower budget-balancing tax rates and higher consumption over the life cycle. In contrast, childcare and education subsidies are less cost-effective in boosting fertility, but they reduce income inequality and raise intergenerational mobility.

Teachers account for less than 5% of the workforce but have disproportionate impacts on the human capital of future generations. This paper studies how teacher compensation policies affect the dynamics of income inequality in the aggregate labor market. I develop an overlapping-generations model and explore a new mechanism where (1) the dispersion of human capital amplifies the selection effects on teacher quality, and (2) teacher quality affects the dispersion itself through endogenous human capital formation. I use evidence on how duty-to-bargain laws shape the teacher labor market and children's outcomes to identify the model in closed form. Counterfactual results suggest that policies that raise the returns to human capital among teachers, e.g., performance-based compensations, have large dynamic spillover effects such as reducing income inequality among non-teachers and boosting intergenerational mobility.

I propose a technique for bounding the magnitude of fertility responses to changes in the cost of children, i.e., fertility elasticity, for any country and year. The range is consistent with empirical estimates and is more precise than current meta-analyses. 

Nearly 40% of births in the United States are unintended, and this phenomenon is disproportionately common among Black Americans and women with lower education. Given that being born to unprepared parents significantly affects children’s outcomes, could family planning access affect intergenerational persistence of economic status? We extend the standard Becker–Tomes model by incorporating an endogenous family planning choice. In a policy counterfactual where states reduce family planning costs for the poor, intergenerational mobility improves by 0.3 standard deviations on average. We also find that differences in family planning costs account for 20% of the racial gap in upward mobility.

We combine GPS data on changes in average distance travelled by individuals at the county level with Covid-19 case data and other demographic information to estimate how individual mobility is affected by local disease prevalence and restriction orders to stay at home. We find that a rise of local infection rate from 0% to 0.003% is associated with a reduction in mobility by 2.31%. An official stay-at-home restriction order corresponds to reducing mobility by 7.87%. Counties with larger shares of population over age 65, lower share of votes for the Republican Party in the 2016 presidential election, and higher population density are more responsive to disease prevalence and restriction orders.