We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. The outcomes of interest are female employment, gender gaps in earnings and fertility. We begin with a discussion of the historical introduction of family...

During the 1980s, the wage gap between white women and white men in the US declined by approximately 1 percentage point per year. In the decades since, the rate of gender wage convergence has stalled to less than one-third of its previous value. An outstanding puzzle in economics is "why did...

Over the last twenty years the wage-education relationships in the US and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education composition of employment has evolved in a surprisingly parallel fashion. In this paper, we propose and test an explanation to these conflicting patterns. The...

This paper examines the role of spillover effects of minimum wages and threat effects of unionization in changes in wage inequality in the United States between 1979 and 2017. A distribution regression framework is introduced to estimate both types of spillover effects. Threat effects double the...

This paper investigates three hypotheses to account for the observed shifts in U.S. relative wages of less educated compared to more educated workers between 1967 and 1992: increased import competition, changes in the relative supplies of labor of different education levels and changes in...

We analyze how separations responded to arbitrary differences in own and peer wages at a large U.S. retailer. Regression-discontinuity estimates imply large causal effects of own wages on separations, and on quits in particular. However, this own-wage response could reflect comparisons either to...