Best Student Paper Midwest Macro Spring 2024

Legal regulations of hours have become increasingly common, yet less is known about how workers’ earnings and hours are set in employment contracts. In this paper, I document in the SIPP that both hourly and non-hourly workers frequently report changes in hours that are persistent, but non-hourly workers’ elasticity of earnings with respect to hours is significantly less than one. To understand these patterns, I develop and estimate a frictional labor market model with implicit contracts motivated by risk-sharing and constrained by limited commitment. Although the model has no explicit hourly and non-hourly contracts, implicit contracts generate a larger earnings elasticity for low-income workers and when turnover is higher as in the data. Restricting hours of work within contracts leads to declines in workers’ output and welfare. This suggests policymakers should yield caution when restricting hours for high income and long-tenure workers who benefit the most from implicit contracts.

This paper uses self-reported plans for retirement to study how divorce and marriage impact retirement decisions. Women who get divorced increase their planned retirement ages and are more likely to report planning to never retire, while women who get married decrease their planned retirement ages. Men’s planned retirement ages move in the opposite direction as women. To better understand these changes, I construct and estimate a life-cycle model with shocks to marital status and endogenous retirement decisions. Based on estimation of the model, financial benefits of marriage explain a large part of how women’s plans for retirement change after divorce but cannot capture the patterns for men.

Summer 2022: Eight lecture course in computational methods for second year economics Ph.D. students.

Fall 2020: Teaching Assistant

Spring 2021: Head Teaching Assistant