…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

-Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”

Publications

Inequality in Early Care Experienced by U.S. Children

Journal of Economic Perspectives (2022) with Sarah Flood, Aaron Sojourner, and Matthew Wiswall

Paper

NBER Working Paper No. 29249

Using every major nationally representative dataset on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age 6, we quantify differences in American childrens’ care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher-SES children spend less time with their parents and more time in the care of others. Non-parental care for high-SES children is more likely to be in childcare centers, where average quality is higher, and less likely to be provided by relatives where average quality is lower. Even within types of childcare, higher-SES children tend to receive care of higher measured quality and higher cost. Inequality is evident at home as well: measures of parental enrichment at home, from both self-reports and outside observers, are on average higher for higher-SES children. We also find that parental and non-parental quality is reinforcing: children who receive higher quality non-parental care also tend to receive higher quality parental care. Head Start, one of the largest government care subsidy programs for low-income households, reduces inequality in care provided, but it is mainly limited to older children and to the lowest income households.

Making Summer Matter: The Impact of Youth Employment on Academic Performance

Quantitative Economics (2021) with Amy Ellen Schwartz, Jacob Leos-Urbel, and Matthew Wiswall

Paper

Supplement

This paper examines New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). SYEP provides jobs to youth ages 14-24, and due to high demand for summer jobs, allocates slots through a random lottery system. We match student-level data from the SYEP program with educational records from the NYC Department of Education and use the random lottery to estimate the effects of SYEP participation on a number of academic outcomes, including test taking and performance. We find that SYEP participation has positive impacts on student academic outcomes, and these effects are particularly large for students who participate in SYEP multiple times.

Working Papers

Child Care Policy and Informal Care

[Updated Draft Coming Soon]

Early child care experiences vary widely across the distribution of socio-economic status (SES), and sizeable skill gaps open up before children enter publicly-provided schooling. SES gradients in the quality of informal, relative-provided, care are particularly large. To understand how variation in the availability and quality of informal care contributes to skill inequality, I estimate a model of child care, mother labor supply, and child skill development, allowing for unequal access to informal care. I exploit the timing of grandmother deaths relative to a child’s birth to identify substitution patterns between informal, formal, and mother-provided child care. I quantify the effect of having access to informal care on child development and mother labor supply, and I estimate that, for over half of the least-advantaged children, the availability of informal care is detrimental to skill development. I ex ante analyze the effects of policies such as universal public daycare, subsidies for formal care, and cash transfers, and estimate that universal, high-quality formal care vouchers can close almost 10% of the age 5 skill gap between children of higher- and lower-educated mothers.

The Effect of Cannabis Legalization on the Frequency of Hospitalizations for Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome

with Isabel Hujoel and Joseph Murray

Under review.

Projects in Progress

Risk-Taking, Family Resources, and a Fuller View of the Portfolio

with Annika Bacher and Eirik Brandsaas

We empirically document the association between parental wealth and the risk-taking behavior of their adult children in the United States. We hypothesize that parental wealth increases risk tolerance of the child household, as wealthy, altruistic parents may provide partial insurance against losses, decreasing the downside to risk in asset, housing, and labor markets. Survey data on US households confirm this hypothesis. We first show that household risk-taking in individual assets is increasing in parental wealth. However, risk in one choice may be hedged against with other assets or expectations about future labor income. Therefore, we use the volatility of next-period wealth normalized by current wealth as our preferred measure of risk-taking, since this measure jointly accounts for multiple sources of risk. We derive the measure from a standard budget equation in a model of labor and portfolio choices with incomplete markets, with a clear mapping from theory to data. Overall risk-taking is increasing in parental wealth.

Human Capital and College Prospects

This paper studies how parental investment in the human capital of children responds to changes in the college environment the child will face in late adolescence. I develop and estimate a dynamic model of parental savings and investment in which parents make a trade-off between saving in financial assets or the human capital of their child. Parents care about their asset position at the end of the finite decision problem as well as the quality of college their child enjoys. College quality is produced by combining tuition dollars, a choice made by the parent, and the human capital of the child in the terminal period. These inputs are complementary, so policies that increase tuition spending on the child will increase the return to investing in one’s child during childhood. I simulate three counterfactual education policies: an unconditional transfer, a conditional tuition grant, and a policy that approximates free public university. I find that such policies increase human capital investment the most in children from poor families, but the magnitudes of the increases are modest.

Skills, Savings, and the Family

I consider how intra-family insurance between prime-age adults and their elderly parents affects incentives to invest in the human capital of children. I document gradients in skills and measures of investment in child human capital with respect to grandparent wealth and health, even accounting for parent resources. Interpreting this as suggesting evidence that grandparent resources shift savings and investment incentives for parents, I jointly model the production of child skills and the consumption-savings of parents and grandparents in an environment with income, health, and expenditure risk and altruistic links but no commitment. I show that such a model provides sharp predictions regarding the importance of intra-family insurance relative to bequests in shifting parental incentives across the lifecycle. A calibrated version of the model is able to qualitatively reproduce the investment gradients present in the data.

Intra-family Insurance, Portfolio Choice, and Inter-generational Wealth Inequality

with Eirik Brandsaas

We consider how intra-family insurance affects household portfolio choices and savings decisions. Empirically, we find that stock market participation and the fraction of assets invested in stocks are increasing in measures of family member human capital. Taking this as suggestive evidence that intra-family insurance reduces risk aversion, we study a model of consumption, savings, and portfolio choice with two-sided altruism and no commitment in which parents and children can insure each other. In the model, agents with family members of lower human capital optimally choose to hold lower portfolio weights, reducing the average rate of return obtained. Families with lower human capital thus not only have lower labor income, but also lower rates of return, potentially propagating both the level and persistence in wealth inequality.