Publications

Childcare Responsibilities and Parental Labor Market Outcomes During the COVID-19 Pandemic

with Benjamin Cowan. 2024. Journal of Labor Research Vol. 45, pp. 153-200.

A substantial fraction of k-12 schools and childcare facilities in the United States closed their in-person operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. These closures may have altered the labor supply decisions of parents of affected children due to a need to be at home and take care of their children during the school day. In this paper, we examine the impact of school and childcare facility closures on parental labor market outcomes. We test whether COVID-19 facilities closures have a disproportionate impact on parents of children under 18 years old. Our results show that both women’s and men’s work lives were affected by school closures, with both groups seeing a reduction in the likelihood of working, work hours and the likelihood of working full-time. We also find that closures had a corresponding negative effect on the earnings of fathers of children under 18 years old, but not on mothers. These effects are concentrated among parents without a college degree, parents working in occupations that do not lend themselves to telework, and parents without other family members living at home, suggesting that such individuals had a more difficult time adjusting their work lives to school and childcare facility closures.

 Working Papers

Political Partisanship and Remote Work: Evidence from U.S. States

with Benjamin Cowan. 2024. NBER Working Paper 32834. 

We examine how politics and policy have affected remote-work rates in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the Current Population Survey, American Community Survey, and the American Time Use Survey, which have several different measures of remote work, we examine how trends in remote work vary by state-level characteristics. We show that state-level measures of the length and stringency of COVID protection policies are not correlated with changes in remote work from before to after the pandemic once a measure of political partisanship (Democratic vote share in the 2020 presidential election) is included in the model. An increase in 2020 Democratic vote share of one standard deviation (about 9 percentage points) is related to an increase in the likelihood of remote work by 1-2 percentage points and the share of remote work by about 3-5 percent. These effects represent roughly 15-25% of pre-COVID means. These results are robust to the inclusion of not only a rich set of individual controls (e.g., occupational telework potential) but also several different state-level controls, including COVID policy indices, cases and deaths, vaccination rates, and economic performance indicators. We conclude that relative increases in remote work across states that are associated with a higher 2020 Democratic vote share cannot be easily explained by differences in COVID-era policies or outcomes or differences in the nature of jobs across states.

The Impact of U.S. School Closures on Labor Market Outcomes during the COVID-19 Pandemic

with Benjamin Cowan. 2022. NBER Working Paper 29641. Also featured on NBER Digest 4 April 2022 and CNN.

An updated version is published in the Journal of Labor Research.

A substantial fraction of k-12 schools in the United States closed their in-person operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. These closures may have altered the labor supply decisions of parents of affected children due to a need to be at home with children during the school day. In this paper, we examine the impact of school closures on parental labor market outcomes. We test whether COVID-19 school closures have a disproportionate impact on parents of school-age children (ages 5-17 years old). Our results show that both women’s and men’s work lives were affected by school closures, with both groups seeing a reduction in work hours and the likelihood of working full-time but only women being less likely to work at all. We also find that closures had a corresponding negative effect on the earnings of parents of school-aged children. These effects are concentrated among parents without a college degree and parents working in occupations that do not lend themselves to telework, suggesting that such individuals had a more difficult time adjusting their work lives to school closures.

How Did School Closures Affect High Schoolers?

2024

This paper investigates how the varying school closures during the academic year 2020-21 affected graduation rates and proficiency rates in Math and Reading/Language Arts of high school students in the United States. In particular, using data from academic year 2010-11 to 2020-21, I utilize difference-and-differences approach to compare the outcomes of districts that experienced longer closures to districts that were closed for a shorter period. Preliminary results suggest that school closures 1) did not hurt overall high school graduation rates, but may have had adversely affected graduation rates of certain vulnerable groups; 2) harmed math proficiency rates of high school students, with steeper declines observed among students of color and students belonging to economically disadvantaged groups, mirroring the situation observed among younger students; and 3) improved high school students’ performance in Reading/Language arts. These findings imply that the shift from traditional in-person classes to online learning during the academic year following the emergence of COVID had complex effects on high school outcomes. I am currently exploring the underlying reasons driving these findings that may include the relaxation of academic standards during this extraordinary time. The policy implications of these findings include the need for learning recovery programs, equipping students with equitable access to infrastructure and digital resources, providing targeted support to vulnerable students tailored to their specific needs, and providing comprehensive support for educators including professional development opportunities, expanded health resources, and adequate staffing.

Online Learning, Social Distancing Restrictions, and College Enrollment in Years 2020-21

2024

The landscape of higher education in the United States has been reshaped by the rapid expansion of online learning in the recent decade, a trend vastly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic’s imperative for a shift from in-person to virtual classroom instruction. This paper investigates how these operational shifts in post-secondary institutions –spurred by the necessity to observe social distancing –have influenced college enrollment of recent high school graduates who themselves may have experienced k-12 school closures during their high school senior year. These massive shift to online learning may have changed students’ preferences to enter college, or have constrained institutions’ capacities to admit students due to their limited resources and social distancing mandates during the school years 2020-21. My results suggest that the pivot to online learning education, coupled with social distancing policies, has led to a decline in both overall and in-state enrollments, with out-of-state enrollments also diminishing in certain instances. These effects are concentrated among four-year post-secondary institutions, and private not-for-profit post-secondary institutions. Additionally, my findings show a marked decrease in male enrollment, with no significant decline in female enrollment, and significant reductions in enrollments across white, Asian, and Hispanic students. These variations are partly attributed to differences in preferences, cultural norms, and societal attitudes across these demographics during this unprecedented time.

The Effect of Extreme Temperature Shocks on the Type of Firm Labor Hired: Evidence from the Philippines

with Gregmar Galinato and Asif Islam. 2023.

Under review

The objective of this article is to empirically estimate the effect of changes in extreme climatic temperature on different types of labor in the manufacturing and services sectors in the Philippines. We use a dataset compiled by pooling firm-level survey data in the Philippines from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys and matching it with the annualized maximum temperature data from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration. The analysis exploits the exogenous annual variation of maximum temperature across regions where firms are located to test the impact of changes in temperature on labor allocation. Using a triple difference estimation procedure, a rise in extreme temperature by 0.08℃ is found to reduce total employment by 15 workers for an average firm with 135 employees that are in tradable industries located in drought regions relative to similar firms in non-tradable industries located in non-drought regions. We also find that permanent workers and labor hired by large firms, especially skilled workers, are most affected by extreme temperature. The main mechanism we test is the reduction in capital investment brought about by rising extreme temperature leading to a complementary reduction in labor hired.