The Effects of the Family and Medical Leave Act on Women's Careers (Job Market Paper)

This paper studies how eligibility for unpaid, job-protected maternity leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) affects women’s employment and earnings after giving birth. I use restricted administrative data on births and quarterly earnings to compare post-birth labor market outcomes for working women who give birth just before versus just after reaching FMLA eligibility, which requires 12 months of job tenure. Although approximate childbirth timing is determined by individual preferences, idiosyncrasies in conception and gestation make it difficult to time births to the month, enabling this identification strategy. I find that eligibility for FMLA leave increases the likelihood women are working for their pre-birth employer in the year after giving birth by 6.3 p.p. (10.2%), which corresponds to higher employment rates overall (3.5 p.p.; 4.6%). FMLA eligibility also increases women's earnings in the short- and long-term, such that eligible women earn $10,000 more over the first six years after giving birth. These estimates imply that a marginal increase in FMLA eligibility would decrease the child penalty by 21% for newly eligible women.

Optimal Transfers with Children's Utility (with Emily Horton)

This paper studies the optimal tax and transfer system when the social planner’s objective is to maximize utility of all individuals, including children, and can use household composition as a fixed tag. While existing research has estimated optimal transfer schedules, it has typically done so only in the context of adults, or without considering children’s utility as part of the planner’s objective function. Given the large extent to which U.S. transfer policy prioritizes redistribution to children, children’s consumption needs are crucial to optimal transfer policy analysis. We simulate the optimal tax and transfer system for unmarried households accounting for children’s consumption, adults’ consumption, and adults’ labor supply responses on the intensive and extensive margin. We place particular emphasis on estimating optimal transfers to non-earning households of different compositions. Our findings demonstrate that the level of children’s consumption needs relative to adults is of first order importance for determining optimal transfers to single parent households. We find that current policy places less emphasis on redistribution to low-income households and households with children than conventional benchmarks would imply is optimal.

Penalties in the Safety Net: Effects of Work Requirement Enforcement on Household Resources (with Katherine Richard)

U.S. cash assistance promotes self-sufficiency through employment but imposes penalties that reduce or remove benefit income when participants violate work requirements. This paper quantifies the downstream consequences of not meeting work requirements using novel administrative data covering the full caseload of Michigan's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, combined with monthly enrollment records in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, as well as quarterly Unemployment Insurance earnings records. We study a policy reform that increased the length of time that families were removed from TANF after violating work requirements to estimate causal responses of long-term safety net attachment and labor supply. We find that penalties result in persistent enrollment declines in SNAP and Medicaid for all household members, even those still eligible for programs. Moreover, when penalties are made more severe, far fewer families re-attach to TANF and formal employment declines due to a decreasing rate of job entry. On net, labor supply responses do not offset lost benefit income, and harsher penalties reduce cumulative financial resources by an additional 84 percent over the subsequent two years. Our findings indicate that sanctions reduce broader safety net attachment and increase economic instability for vulnerable families over the long-term. 

Who is Financially Constrained in Their Choice of Contraception? Lessons from M-CARES (with Martha Bailey, Alexa Prettyman, Vanessa Wanner Lang, and Vanessa Dalton)

• • •  American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, 2024

The Michigan Contraceptive Access, Research, and Evaluation Study (M-CARES) is a randomized control trial that examines how financial constraints affect the choice of contraceptives among uninsured individuals. Although all M-CARES participants are highly financially constrained, these constraints are more binding in some subgroups. Black women, women with less than a high school degree, and women with incomes above 250 percent of the federal poverty line are less financially constrained, whereas married women and those with three or more children are more financially constrained. A mediation analysis shows that attitudes and beliefs about contraception do not explain this heterogeneity across groups.