Research

"Workplace Amenities and Labor Market Inequality" (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: Jobs differ in wages and in the amenities they provide, particularly workplace flexibility—the temporal aspects of work including schedule predictability and demands on workers' time. While prior work documents wage-flexibility trade-offs, the role of production technology in shaping these compensating differentials remains largely unexplored. Using French matched employer-employee data linked to large-scale surveys, I document three empirical patterns: (1) flexibility co-varies within firms across establishments and occupations; (2) some flexibility dimensions correlate positively and others negatively with pay; and (3) women sort into jobs with better flexibility within occupations, suggesting preferences drive sorting. To explain these patterns, I develop and estimate an equilibrium model where firms choose wages and amenities subject to both worker preferences and technological constraints. The model reveals that high-skill occupations face productivity costs from providing flexibility roughly twice those of mid-skill occupations. Decomposing equilibrium outcomes, I find that technological parameters explain 22 percent of amenity variation. Counterfactual simulations demonstrate that equalizing women's amenity preferences to men's would reduce the gender wage gap by 4.6 percentage points (20 percent of the baseline gap), while mandating minimum flexibility levels would widen the gender gap by 1.8 percentage points. These findings reveal fundamental technological barriers to amenity provision that drive worker sorting and limit the effectiveness of flexibility mandates, with important implications for understanding the gender pay gap.

Labor market trends and unemployment insurance generosity during the pandemic (with Lucas Finamor)

Economics Letters 199 (2021), 109722.

Selected press coverage: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, CNBC, Vox, NPR's All Things Considered, Marketplace.

Flexibility for Both Parents: Remote Work and the Evolution of Child Penalties (with Elin Sundberg). 

Can workplace flexibility reduce child penalties by helping women balance work and family? We examine this question using Swedish administrative data and the rapid adoption of remote work during COVID-19. Using a triple-difference design, we compare child penalties before and after the pandemic across occupations with differential exposure to remote work. We find that remote work failed to reduce motherhood penalties: changes in employment, hours, and wage penalties show no systematic relationship with remote work adoption. We develop a household model to clarify the mechanisms producing these null results. When a mother gains the option to work remotely, she saves commuting time but also faces a wage penalty and becomes more productive in home production. Whether she increases market work or shifts toward home production depends on which force dominates. Across heterogeneous households, these opposing responses offset to produce minimal aggregate effects. Our findings suggest that expanding access to flexibility may be insufficient to reduce motherhood penalties without changing how households divide work.

"Is the Grass Always Greener? Imperfect Information about Amenities and Job-to-Job Transitions"

Abstract: Non-wage amenities vary widely across firms, shaping worker preferences and sorting patterns in the labor market. Some amenities—such as paid vacation or remote work policies—are observable to job seekers during the search process, while others—such as job stress, autonomy, or respect from colleagues—are only revealed after a worker accepts the job. Similarly, information about pay may be partially observed during search. This paper studies how these information gaps shape worker decision-making by examining employment-to-employment (E:E) transitions, where workers have full information about the job they are leaving but only partial information about the job they are accepting. I quantify the amenity content and pay transparency of jobs using two complementary sources: (1) a novel AI-based labeling of publicly posted French job ads to infer advertised amenities and compensation information, and (2) large-scale worker surveys matched to administrative data capturing realized pay and ex post job characteristics. I develop a simple model of job choice with asymmetric information to interpret patterns of revealed preference and identify the role of informational frictions in shaping job mobility.

“The Disappearing Rung: AI and Moral Hazard in Human Capital Formation”

Abstract: This paper examines how AI-driven task automation alters the incentives for human capital investment in settings where skill acquisition is sequential and experience-based. Individuals often build expertise by progressing from simple, repetitive tasks to more complex, cognitively demanding work. AI tools can now substitute for many entry-level tasks, raising concerns that such substitution may disrupt learning-by-doing and reduce opportunities to acquire foundational skills. At the same time, AI may complement higher-skill workers by allowing them to offload routine components and focus more intensively on complex tasks. I develop a model that captures the static productivity gains and dynamic incentive distortions introduced by AI. The framework highlights how moral hazard can arise when short-run performance incentives encourage early reliance on automation, potentially crowding out long-run human capital accumulation. I derive conditions under which AI adoption enhances or erodes skill development, and discuss implications for organizational design, labor market mobility, and the regulation of AI usage in education and workplace settings.

"Race and Consumer Bankruptcy" (with Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and Jialan Wang)

Employment Effects of Unemployment Insurance Generosity During the Pandemic (with Joseph Altonji, Zara Contractor, Lucas Finamor, Ryan Haygood, Ilse Lindenlaub, Costas Meghir, Cormac O’Dea, Dana Scott, Liana Wang, and Ebonya Washington)

Policy Report, Yale University Tobin Center for Economic Policy, 2020.