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Journal Article
Home Production Activity during the COVID-19 Shutdown
An increase in household activities—including child care and cooking—between January and April coincides with job losses during the coronavirus pandemic.
Working Paper
Flexible Retirement and Optimal Taxation
Raising the retirement age is a common policy response when social security schemes face fiscal pressures. We develop and estimate a dynamic life cycle model to study optimal retirement and tax policy when individuals face health shocks and income risk and make endogenous retirement decisions. The model incorporates key features of Social Security, Medicare, income taxation, and savings incentives and distinguishes three channels through which health affects retirement: nonconvexities in labor supply due to health-dependent fixed costs of working, earnings reductions, and mortality risk. We ...
The Household Shift from Paid Work to Home Production
When U.S. workers lose their jobs or have reduced work hours, how does this affect time spent on activities like cooking and child care?
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
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. ...