Lindsey Uniat

We examine how labor market gender disparities following childbirth relate to long-run intra-household consumption inequality. A novel survey we implemented in the German Socio-Economic Panel shows that women less educated than their partners are more likely to face child-related career disruptions and receive fewer household resources, underscoring the role of marriage market sorting in intra-household decision-making. However, even controlling for partners’ relative education, female career disruptions are associated with higher male consumption. This suggests that childbirth can generate gender disparities not only in labor market outcomes but also in long-term consumption—an overlooked dimension of the “motherhood penalty”.

What role have factors affecting female labor supply, such as social norms and discrimination, played in the decline of routine jobs in the U.S. since the 1970’s? While typically attributed to changes in labor demand, the decline in routine employment has been larger for women than men, reflecting a shift of female employment out of routine clerical jobs and into non-routine professions. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the impact of falling labor market distortions faced by women in explaining the trend. One observable manifestation of these falling distortions is the Quiet Revolution, which refers to a shift in women’s life cycle labor force attachment from intermittent to continuous after 1970; it spurred the rise of female non-routine employment because these are long-term careers that reward experience. I develop and calibrate an equilibrium model of the labor market featuring the Quiet Revolution, discrimination, and improvement in automation. Counterfactual analyses reveal that the Quiet Revolution and reduced discrimination explain 21% and 59%, respectively, of the growth of non-routine relative to routine white-collar employment among women between 1970 and 2000. Together, they explain 36% of the aggregate increase, while automation explains 56%. Finally, the Quiet Revolution raised output per worker by 3% via increased female experience.

India’s GDP per capita grew threefold between 1987 and 2019, coinciding with rapid urbanization. During this period, female labor force participation (FLFP) declined significantly. Consistent with this observation, we document a pronounced urban-rural participation gap, where FLFP is higher in poorer, rural labor markets. Using time-use data, we show that this is primarily driven by an extensive margin: in rural districts, women often engage in part-time activities, typically related to agriculture and informal family businesses. These activities are less common in urban areas, where some women take formal jobs, but a larger share withdraws from the labor market to focus on home production. We propose and estimate a model of household labor supply that aligns with these trends. The main drivers of the urban-rural participation gap are higher spousal incomes in cities, which reduce the marginal utility of female labor, and labor market distortions that depress women’s urban wages below their marginal product. Counterfactual simulations show that economic growth is unlikely to provide a sharp reversal of this trend in future decades unless it is accompanied by changes in gender norms and labor market institutions.

The government often contracts with private firms to deliver in-kind safety net benefits. These public–private partnerships generate agency problems that could increase costs, but cost containment reforms may discourage firm participation. We study a 2012 reform of California’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children that reduced the number of small vendors. We show that within-zip-code access to small vendors increases take-up among first-time and foreign-born mothers, suggesting that small vendors are distinctly effective at lowering take-up barriers among women with high program learning costs. Thus, cost containment reforms may have unintended consequences of inequitably reducing program access.

While over 240,000 American students experienced a school shooting in the last two decades, little is known about the impacts of these events on the mental health of surviving youth. Using large-scale prescription data from 2006 to 2015, we examine the effects of 44 school shootings on youth antidepressant use. Our empirical strategy compares the number of antidepressant prescriptions written by providers practicing 0 to 5 miles from a school that experienced a shooting (treatment areas) to the number of prescriptions written by providers practicing 10 to 15 miles away (reference areas), both before and after the shooting. We include month-by-year and school-by-area fixed effects in all specifications, thereby controlling for overall trends in antidepressant use and all time-invariant differences across locations. We find that local exposure to fatal school shootings increases youth antidepressant use by 21.4% in the following 2 y. These effects are smaller in areas with a higher density of mental health providers who focus on behavioral, rather than pharmacological, interventions.