Research
Research
with Katherina Thomas
This paper studies how parental behaviors, specifically warmth, inconsistency, reasoning, and hostility, influence the development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills during middle childhood and adolescence. Using rich Australian panel data, we present novel evidence that reporting bias in parent-reported measures of children's skills is driven by parenting style. To address this bias and consistently estimate the impact of parenting style on skill development, we employ fixed effects and use past investments as instruments for current investments. To demonstrate that our approach mitigates the bias, we also present results using teacher-reported measures. We find that parental hostility, lack of praise and anger during punishments, negatively impacts non-cognitive skills, decreasing them by 0.12 to 0.23 SD depending on age. Inconsistency in enforcing rules negatively impacts skills in middle childhood but not adolescence, decreasing skills by 0.08-0.10 SD. While parental warmth and reasoning do not influence emotional or behavioral problems, warmth does have a positive impact on prosocial behaviors of children. Cognitive skills are less affected by parenting behavior variations, parental warmth reduces skills by 0.03 SD and inconsistency by 0.07 SD for vocabulary and matrix reasoning tests. In contrast, we find impacts for hostility on school performance, similar in direction as for non-cognitive skills suggesting that non-cognitive skills influence performance. These results highlight the potential effectiveness of interventions focused on reducing parental hostility and enhancing consistency in boosting skill development, thereby contributing to children's human capital formation.
with Sophie Brochet and Prasanthi Ramakrishnan
[Draft available soon]
The sex ratio in India is regionally very skewed. As a result, it is common for women to move out of their district for marriage. In this paper, we focus on the causes and consequences of women’s marriage migration. We document new empirical facts associated with sex ratio, probability of marriage migration, and household characteristics. We find that women are more like to migrate for mar-riage to a region with a more skewed sex ratio and to a rural household, where the household head has at least primary education. We build a collective household marriage market model to understand the impact of bargaining power on women. Preliminary results indicate that an increase in the probability of marriage migration results in lower bargaining power amongst women.
Labor market integration programs affect not only immigrants’ economic outcomes but also their social integration. In this paper, I analyze how measures of social integration, like the share of marriages with natives and immigrants’ spatial concentration, change under different policy scenarios. I first show correlations between immigrants’ labor market outcomes, marital patterns, and spatial distribution. Then, using German data, I estimate a structural model with location, marriage, and labor supply decisions. The model reflects two trade-offs immigrants face: a) partner choice: ”marry your like” vs. economic gains from marriage with a native, and b) location choice: a region with higher wages vs. a region with better marriage opportunities. Model simulations reveal that: 1) reducing the immigrant-native income gap by 25% decreases immigrants’ spatial concentration (by 2.9%), but lowers the share of immigrant women married to natives (by 2 pp); 2) declining the regional wage gap by 50% significantly reduces immigrants’ spatial concentration (by 15%), increases the share of immigrant men married to native (by 1.1 pp), but decreases the share of immigrant women married to natives (by 0.6 pp). I also find that ignoring adjustments in location and marriage choices under both policies overstates the decrease in immigrant-native income inequality and underpredicts the welfare gains. The reason for that is when immigrants’ labor market position improves, they give up part of their income gains and marry natives less often to satisfy their taste for similarity in partners’ origin, increasing their welfare.