Job Market Paper
"Afterschool Care Subsidies and Maternal Employment"
Abstract: Afterschool care addresses the gap between the school day and the full-time workday. I study how afterschool care affects maternal employment using the staggered rollout of 21st Century Community Learning Center grants. I collect a novel dataset on these grants and build a precise geographic linkage with individuals in restricted-access Census Bureau data. I find that while overall maternal employment does not change, Black and other minority non-Hispanic mothers are 6.2 percentage points more likely to work full time when their nearest elementary school receives a grant. At the same time, women living near these schools are 0.67 percentage points less likely to report working in a care occupation. Among mothers, the decline in care occupation is driven by Hispanic mothers (-1.03 pp). Because mothers both use and provide childcare, understanding its effect on maternal employment requires measuring effects on both.
Published Research
"Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from US School Districts." (with Clare Halloran, James Okun, and Emily Oster), AER: Insights, 2023.
Media coverage: NBER Digest, The Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Yahoo News
"COVID-19, School Closures, and Outcomes." (with Emily Oster), Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2023.
Media coverage: New York Times
"Gender Salience and Chat-Based Communication in Teams." AEA Papers & Proceedings, 2025.
"Effectiveness of three versus six feet of physical distancing for controlling spread of COVID-19 among primary and secondary students and staff: A retrospective, state-wide cohort study." (with Polly van den Berg, Elissa Perkins, Isabella Epshtein, Richard Nelson, Emily Oster, and Westyn Branch-Elliman) Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2021.
"Disparities in learning mode access among K–12 students during the COVID-19 pandemic, by race/ethnicity, geography, and grade level—United States, September 2020–April 2021." (with Emily Oster, Clare Halloran, John Schoof, Diana McLeod, Haisheng Yang, Julie Roche, and Dennis Roche) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 2021, 70(26), p.953.
Working Papers
“The Landscape of Parental Leave-Taking in the United States” (with Daniel Tannenbaum and Brenden Timpe). Revise and resubmit, AEJ: Economic Policy.
“Sick Days, Snow Days, and the Labor Market Impacts of Caretaking Inequities” (with Garrett Anstreicher)
"The Parenthood Gap: Firms, Flexibility, and Earnings Inequality After Kids" (with Daniel Tannenbaum and Brenden Timpe)
Additional write-ups and coverage: Upjohn Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
"Post COVID-19 Test Score Recovery: Initial Evidence from State Testing Data." (with Clare Halloran, Claire Hug, and Emily Oster), NBER Working Paper 31113
Media coverage: NBER Digest, The Economist
"COVID-19 mitigation practices and COVID-19 rates in schools: Report on data from Florida, New York and Massachusetts." (with Emily Oster, Clare Halloran, John Schoof, and Diana McLoed) medRxiv, 2021.
Selected Works in Progress
“The Continuing Impact of COVID-19 School Closures on Teenagers”