Research
Abortions and Inequality, Job Market Paper, December 2011
In the last three decades over a million abortions were performed annually in the United States. Recent empirical studies assess the impact of legalization of abortions on living conditions of children and argue that legalization of abortions provides better living conditions and human capital endowments to surviving children. This paper takes seriously the hypothesis that legalized abortion can improve the living conditions of children and hence alter their future labor market outcomes. The main question of the paper is what are the implications of abortions for long-term income inequality. A model of marriage, fertility, human capital transmission, contraception and abortion decisions is built to answer this question quantitatively. Inequality will be higher in a world without abortions. The main reason for this is the higher and more unequally distributed number of children across households. Children also receive less human capital.
Technology and the Changing Family: A Unified Model of Marriage, Divorce, Educational Attainment and Married Female Labor-Force Participation, with Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner and Cezar Santos, January 2012
Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the non-college educated vis-à-vis the college educated. Additionally, assortative mating has risen; i.e., people are more likely to marry someone of the same educational level today than in the past. A unified model of marriage, divorce, educational attainment and female labor-force participation is developed and estimated to fitt the postwar U.S. data. The role of technological progress in the household sector and shifts in the wage structure for explaining these facts is gauged.
Hear about this paper in Nezih Guner’s TEDx talk.
Changes in Ethnic Earnings Differentials in Transitional Bulgaria: Underlying Factors, coming soon
This paper analyzes what changes occurred in the relative earnings of the ethnic Turkish workers in Bulgaria at the start (early 1990s) and in the final years of transition (early 2000s) compared to pre-transitional levels (mid 1980s). The ethnic earnings gap increased immediately after the change of the regime but was similar in size at the start and in the final years of transition. However, changes in the ethnic earnings differentials are different for men and women. In the case of men, the ethnic gap steadily increases during transition, while for women it rises at the start of the transition but declines in the final years. The analysis identifies different sources of the changes in the gap such as changes in the labor market characteristics (group-specific factors), changes in the wage structure, and labor supply and demand shifts which affect the relative earnings of Turkish workers through reduced participation.
