Publications

Policy changes that aim to increase the female labor supply, such as moving from joint to individual taxation of married couples, are high on the agenda of policymakers and widely discussed among economists. Much of the macroeconomic analysis has focused on the direct effects of adding more (female) workers to the labor force by assuming that men and women are perfect substitutes in the production process. I develop a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and family labor supply to characterize the quantitative importance of relaxing this assumption. This is disciplined by my estimate of the elasticity of substitution between male and female labor inputs for modern-day Germany of 0.71. For identification, I exploit a natural experiment that induced exogenous time and county-level variation in the availability of public childcare. In my model, I study the implications of a reform that moves to individual taxation and find that it substantially affects the labor force participation of married women (+12.6%) and overall output (+6.8%). This result compares to an output increase of 3.3% in the perfect substitutability case. Differences in demand responses for male labor inputs drive this effect. Thus, disregarding the added benefits of gender diversity underestimates the positive effects of such a policy change.

We study the expansion of the non-contributory public health care system Seguro Integral de Salud in Peru using a general equilibrium heterogeneous agents model and find that overall welfare increases, but informality rises while tax revenues and output decrease.

We study the response of monthly U.S. dollar real exchange rates to global and country-specific temperature shocks and find substantial cross-sectional differences across country pairs. The real exchange rate is more likely to depreciate if the country is warmer, wealthier, more dependent on agriculture, less open, and more dependent on tourism.

Using a life-cycle model of heterogeneous households, family labor supply, and intra-household bargaining, I study the effects of increasing U.S. public spending on childcare to Scandinavian levels on women’s labor supply and find that the policy increases long-run labor force participation among married women.

I study a German pension reform which allows workers to accumulate more pension capital through continued employment during retirement using an overlapping generations heterogeneous agents model. I find the reform is welfare enhancing, and it creates large incentives for workers to remain employed longer.