Profile
I am a labor and development economist who studies fertility, human capital, and female labor force participation. I explore how these choices' market and policy environments cause socio-economic inequality, especially for women in developing countries and poor women in the US. In developing countries, female disadvantage originates early in life and persists throughout the life-cycle. Parents often selectively abort to have boys instead of girls; they invest more in sons than daughters. Women are often expected to have children in early adulthood and devote their lives to raising them; their families usually prefer them not to work. I study the economic fundamentals that cause fertility and employment policies to perpetuate female life-cycle disadvantage in developing countries. Female disadvantage also originates early in the life cycle in the US. In poor households, fathers are more likely to stay in a family when they have sons than when they have daughters. The high rate of single motherhood among the poor restricts child investment. I explore how early education mitigates the inequality generated by this resource-scarcity. My research combines administrative, archival, experimental, and survey data and employs modern microeconometric methods to identify causal effects; it uses economic models to understand the fundamentals driving causal effects.
