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Journal Article
College Freshman Enrollment Drops during Pandemic
First-time college enrollment declined significantly in 2020—a stark contrast with what traditionally happens during recessions.
COVID-19’s Impact on U.S. Home Production
The large drop in weekly work hours during the pandemic led to increased time spent on activities like cooking and child care.
Working Paper
On the Benefits of Currency Reform
Money allows agents to achieve allocations that are not possible without it. How- ever, currency in most economies is a uniform object, and there may be incentive compatible allocations that cannot be implemented with a uniform currency. We show that currency reform, ie, changing the monetary base by replacing one currency with another, is a powerful tool that can enable a planner to achieve his desired allocation. Our monetary mechanism with currency reform is anonymous and features nonlinear pricing of consumption goods and future assets, as observed in practice. Our result suggests that ...
Why Do Women Outnumber Men in College Enrollment?
Women appear to have a relatively higher financial return to college education than men, who have access to lucrative careers that require only a high school diploma.
Working Paper
Home Production and Leisure During the COVID-19 Recession
Between the months of February and April of 2020, average weekly market hours dropped by 6.25, meanwhile 35% of commuting workers reported switching to remote work arrangements. In this paper, we examine implications of these changes for the time allocation of different households, and on aggregate. We estimate that home production activity increased by 2.1 hours a week, or 34% of lost market hours, whereas leisure activity increased by 3.8 hours a week. The monthly value of home production increased by $30.83 billion – that is 10.5% of the concurrent $292.61 billion drop in monthly GDP. ...
How Child Care Impacts Parents’ Labor Force Participation
An analysis finds that women with a partner and young children—those most likely to be sensitive to child care costs—had the strongest rebound in LFP since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Working Paper
Insurance and Inequality with Persistent Private Information
This paper studies the implications of optimal insurance provision for long-run welfare and inequality in economies with persistent private information. We consider a model in which a principal insures an agent whose privately observed endowment follows an ergodic, finite Markov chain. The optimal contract always induces immiseration: the agent’s consumption and utility decrease without bound. Under positive serial correlation, the optimal contract also features backloaded high-powered incentives: the sensitivity of the agent’s utility with respect to his report increases without bound. ...
What Are the Trade-offs of Meritocratic College Admissions?
St. Louis Fed research suggests that removing certain constraints in college admission standards and higher-education funding could boost entry and graduation rates and earnings.
Women’s Evolving Careers Helped Shrink the Gender Pay Gap
The narrowing of the gender pay gap since the 1970s appears to be linked to women increasing their labor force attachment and shifting to higher-paying occupations.
The Pandemic’s Influence on U.S. Fertility Rates
The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have had a negative impact on fertility for U.S. women ages 30-34, though birth rates did increase among women ages 20-24.