We analyze the employment effect of a law that provides for a 36 percent increase in the generosity of disability insurance (DI) for claimants who are, as a result of their lack of skills and of the labour market conditions they face, deemed unlikely to find a job. The selection process for...

Do wealth shocks affect the health of the elderly in developed countries? The economic literature is skeptical about such effects which have so far only been found for poor retirees in poor countries. In this paper I show that wealth shocks also matter for the health of wealthy retirees in the...

Each year, many pregnant women fast from dawn to sunset during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Medical theory suggests that this may have negative long-term health effects on their offspring. Building upon the work of Almond and Mazumder (2008), and using Indonesian crosssectional data, I...

We investigate cross-hour effects in spousal labor supply exploiting independent variation in hours worked generated by the introduction of the short workweek in France in the late 1990s. We find that female and male employees treated by the shorter legal workweek reduce their weekly labor...

I consider how the availability of a personal computer at home changed employment for married women. I develop a theoretical model that motivates the empirical specifications. Using data from the U.S. CPS from 1984 to 2003, I find that employment is 1.5 to 7 percentage points higher for women in...

Is improved school accessibility an effective policy tool for reducing child labor in developing countries? We address this question using micro data from rural Tanzania and a regression strategy that attempts to control for non-random location of households around schools as well as classical...

The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about...

It is well documented that graduates enter different occupations in recessions than in booms. In this article, we examine the impact of this reallocation for long-term productivity and output across sectors. We develop a model in which talent flows to stable sectors in recessions and to cyclical...

Increases in female employment and falling fertility rates have often been linked to rising female wages. However, over the last 30 years the US total fertility rate has been fairly stable while female wages have continued to grow. Over the same period, we observe that women's hours spent on...

This paper explains the narrowing of gender gaps in wages and market hours in recent decades by the growth of the service economy. We propose a model with three sectors: goods, services and home production. Women have a comparative advantage in the production of services in the market and at...