Working papers
Working papers
with Lukas Riedel
YEP Doctoral Paper Award, 2024
Abstract: We show that the widespread approach to estimate the career costs of motherhood – so-called “child penalties” – is prone to produce biased results, as it pools first-time mothers of all ages without accounting for their differences in characteristics and outcomes. We propose a novel method building on the recent advances in the difference-in-differences literature to address this issue. Applied to German administrative data, our method yields 30 percent larger post-birth earnings losses than the conventional approach. We document meaningful effect heterogeneity by maternal age in both magnitude and interpretation, highlighting its key role in understanding the impact of motherhood.
with Olga Kuzmina
Runner-Up Paper Award, 8th EFiC Conference in Banking and Corporate Finance, 2024
Abstract: Quotas have become a widespread policy tool to promote diversity in politics, education, and the corporate world. We develop a novel approach to evaluate the causal effects of universal percentage-based quotas. We exploit discontinuities in the actual share of an underrepresented group that arise solely due to rounding, whenever percentage-based regulations apply to a small team. We illustrate this approach by revisiting the question of how gender quotas in corporate boards affect firm performance. Contrary to previous studies that document negative effects, we find that quota-induced increases in the presence of women on boards have a positive impact on firms' outcomes. We explain these discrepancies by providing evidence of a downward bias in the common approach to studying gender quota effects, which uses the pre-quota share of women as treatment within DiD and IV models.
Work in progress
with Sarah Gharbi and Eloïse Menestrier
We evaluate a subsidized employment policy for disadvantaged youth in France, which was implemented to assist young workers struggling with the transition from school to work, experiencing unemployment, and residing in deprived areas. Starting with the investigation of average effects, we observe that the effect on the employment probability — the primary objective of this policy — is close to zero and only marginally significant. In contrast, when considering gender heterogeneity, our analysis indicates significant and positive effects on all outcomes for men. However, for women, the program fails to enhance the likelihood of employment. We identify two reasons for such discrepancies in programs effects for men and women. First, women are more likely to have children during the program, which causes them to drop out and experience no benefits from participation. Additionally, we observe gender-based sorting into different job types at the start of subsidized employment, with men typically securing cognitive tasks in public administration or industry, while women tend to occupy routine non-cognitive roles in healthcare and childcare. Our results have strong policy implications for both future policy evaluations and policy designs.
with Suzanne Bellue
We document a significant gender gap in job-to-job mobility: full-time employed women are 10% less likely to do a job-to-job transition than men in a given year. We document that this gap emerges primarily after first childbirth, with women not changing employers during a maternity leave and decreasing their mobility after returning to the labor market. We study potential explanations for the latter and observe that mothers, even those who return to full-time work after childbirth, substantially reduce their commuting distance. This might serve as an explanation for the job-to-job mobility gap through the reduction of geographical radius of search and of the pool of vacancies and offers for mothers. Since full-time job-to-job transitions serve as a way to climb a career ladder and outside offers affect within-firm barganing power, this gender mobility gap most likely contributes to the child penalty and glass ceiling phenomena.
with Jörg Heining and Sebastian Siegloch
On-the-job training and upskilling have become a widespread tool to extend working life duration, overcome shortages of skilled workers, and to adapt to sectoral or industrial changes and the development of new technologies. However, there is very little evidence on the effectiveness of such programs due to the endogeneity of training decisions. We exploit the unique setting in Germany, in which age and firm size serve as eligibility criteria for subsidized vocational training targeted at older and low-qualified workers. Discontinuities around the eligibility cut-offs allow us to investigate causal effects of getting additional on-the-job training by workers at risk of unemployment. We aim to provide an informed policy advice regarding the effectiveness of such programs as a tool for adjustments to changes in labor markets and preventing unemployment.