Elisa Taveras | Assistant Professor An Unintended Effect of School Entrance Age: Pushing Children Ahead through Private School

of Spouses’ Relative on Household Time abstract : Does spouses’ relative education explain their household’s distribution of labor? This paper analyzes the effect of educational attainment on time allocated to housework and paid work. To address endogeneity concerns, I implement a novel identification strategy by exploiting changes in spouses’ education relationship due to remarriage to identify its effects on their time allocation. I find that when an individual marries a spouse with higher relative education than their previous one, the individual’s share of housework time increases while their share of paid work time decreases. I also find that the spouse’s relative education reduces the probability of a stay-at-home spouse. The effects are stronger when a husband marries a more educated wife than his previous one. These findings show that relative human capital plays a role in household labor distribution and motivates a more gender-neutral division of labor within abstract : Does a child’s birth date affect his or her probability of attending a private school? In the United States, most children must be five years old by September to start public kindergarten. An alternative option is to attend private schools, which are not obliged to comply with states’ cutoffs. To explore this, I look at the effect of children’s quarter of birth on their probability of attending private school by grade (pre-kindergarten through 12th grade). Using the American Community Survey, I find that children born in July–September and October–December are more likely to attend private when limited private abstract : We use information on the occupation choices and earnings of immigrants to measure differ-ences in specific skills between workers from rich and poor countries. We have several findings. First, the skills which rich country workers specialize in mirror the skills which high-income individuals specialize in. Second, rich country workers have the greatest advantage in skills related to the ability to generate ideas (like creativity and critical thinking) rather than scientific or technical knowledge. Third, the skills in which rich country workers have the greatest advantage align closely with the skills used in management occupations. Fourth, workers from rich countries are more varied in their skills (e.g., what one Canadian is good at is different from what another Canadian is). These findings do not appear to be accounted for by the non-randomness of immigration or mismeasurement of skills. Overall, our results suggest that rich country workers have skills particularly well-adapted to production processes involving the coordinated efforts of large groups of people. abstract : This paper asks whether the effect of fertility on women’s labor supply depends on gender norms. To separate the role of gender norms from institutional features, I compare the labor supply response to having more than two children among women who all live in the United States but were born in different countries. I find that, while women from all countries reduce employment in response to having children, this effect is substantially larger for women who were born in less gender-egalitarian countries. In particular, women from countries with the least egalitarian gender norms have an employment response three times larger than the employment response of natives or immigrants from the most egalitarian countries. Hence, the negative effect of fertility on labor supply decreases with gender egalitarianism.