Working Papers
"Childcare and the New Part-Time: Gender Gaps in Long-Hour Professions"
"The gender wage gap in the United States is persistent and especially pronounced at the top of the distribution. Recent worker surveys suggests this gap is in part driven by a difference in average work hours, even between men and women employed full-time. This paper examines gender differences in work timing and elasticity using hourly data on worker activity for approximately 145,000 tech workers in order to understand what leads to this difference in the number of hours worked. I find both genders work outside the traditional work week, but men work more than women on nights and weekends – times when formal childcare is relatively scarce. In order to isolate the impact of childcare, I examine how work activity varies in response to unexpected winter weather public school closures. Women respond to these unexpected breaks in childcare by reducing work activity by 34%. Male work activity does not respond to these unexpected breaks. The results provide evidence for the emerging theory that the persistent wage gap between men and women in high-wage professions is a function of a long-hour wage premium and the allocation of within-household childcare to women."
"Getting into the Weeds of Tax Invariance" with Ben Hansen, Keaton Miller, and Caroline Weber
This paper provides a general test of tax invariance. It shows that when a 25 percent gross receipts tax was eliminated on wholesale cannabis firms in Washington state and the retail cannabis excise tax was simultaneously increased from 25 to 37 percent -- a move intended to be revenue neutral -- tax invariance does not hold. Instead one-third of the tax is passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. Wholesale and retail firms adjust their prices such that retail firms maintain a constant markup. As a result, wholesale profit on each gram of cannabis sold rises and retail profit on each gram falls. We show decisions about pass-through of these tax changes varies based on key characteristics of the firms and market in which they reside. The failure of tax invariance has wide-ranging implications for how tax systems are designed.
Works in Progress
“Who is Speaking and How Much? Conversation Dynamics by Gender and Race”
Much has been written about the difference in how men and women behave in formal conversation. Record- ings of conferences and oce meetings show that men speak more than women in conversation, on average. In order to more carefully investigate this phenomenon, I consider how interviewer and interviewee speaking times vary by gender in podcast interviews. I construct a novel dataset of podcast interview recordings using automatic speech recognition programs to quantitatively describe the number of times each person in a conversation speaks and the duration of their speaking. Repeated observations of interviewers on their own podcast and interviewees across multiple podcasts allows for identification of the interaction effects of interviewer and interviewee characteristics, by both race and gender.
Published Papers
These papers come from work completed before entering graduate school.
“Public Opinion about Management Strategies for a Low-Profile Species across Multiple Jurisdictions: Whitebark Pine in the Northern Rockies” with Eric D.Raile, Helen T. Naughton, Lena Wooldridge, Courtney Kellogg, Michael P. Wallner, and Elizabeth A. Shanahan, People and Nature. 2020.
As public land managers seek to adopt and implement conservation measures aimed at reversing or slowing the negative effects of climate change, they are looking to understand public opinion regarding different management strategies. This study explores drivers of attitudes toward different management strategies (i.e., no management, protection, and restoration) for a low-profile but keystone tree species, the whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Since the whitebark pine species has a range that traverses different federal land designations, we examine whether attitudes toward management strategies differ by jurisdiction (i.e., wilderness or federal lands more generally). We conducted a web and mail survey of residents from Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, with 1,617 valid responses and a response rate of 16%. We find that active management strategies have substantially higher levels of support than does no management, with relatively little differentiation across protection and restoration activities or across different land designations. We also find that values (political ideology) do not influence support for management strategies, but beliefs (about material vs. post-material environmental orientation, global climate change, and federal spending for public lands) and some measures of experience (e.g., knowledge of threats) do influence support for management activities. This study helps land managers understand that support for active management of the whitebark pine species is considerable and nonpartisan and that beliefs and experience with whitebark pine trees are important for support.
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pan3.10094
“How much are US households prepared to pay to manage and protect whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.)?” with Eric D.Raile, Elizabeth A. Shanahan, Helen T. Naughton, and Michael P. Wallner, Forestry: An International Journal of Forest Research. 2018
The whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis Engelm.) tree species faces precipitously declining populations in many locations. It is a keystone species found primarily in high-elevation forests across the Western US. The species is an early responder to climate change and qualifies for endangered species protection. We use contingent valuation to estimate the public’s willingness to pay for management of the whitebark pine species. In contrast, previous work centres on valuing broader aspects of forest ecosystems or threats to multiple tree species. While only approximately half of the survey respondents have seen whitebark pine, the mean willingness to pay for whitebark pine management is $135 per household. When aggregated across all households from the three sampled states, willingness to pay totals $163 million. This information is valuable to forest managers who must make difficult decisions in times of resource constraints and climate change.
https://academic.oup.com/forestry/article/92/1/52/5238190
“Trade and Sustainability: The Impact of the International Tropical Timber Agreements on Exports,” with Helen T. Naughton, International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. 2017.
Environmental sustainability standards are often portrayed as a hindrance to trade and growth. A set of novel international environmental agreements (IEAs), the International Tropical Timber Agreements (ITTAs), seeks to promote both. The ITTAs encourage international trade for member nations while requiring sustainable timber practices. This paper uses the ITTAs as a case study to examine whether IEAs can lead to environmental cooperation at the same time as increasing trade. Membership in both the 1983 and 1994 ITTAs is examined for an effect on timber exports. The analysis is conducted using panel data for 165 countries between 1970 and 2011 while controlling for year fixed effects, country fixed effects and country-specific trend terms. Estimated ITTA effects vary by ITTA year, timber category and country type. Logs exports fell for both tropical and non-tropical country members, but these decreases were offset by increases in other timber category exports. Tropical country members increased plywood exports, while non-tropical country ITTA members increased exports of sawn wood and veneer sheets. Total exports of targeted timber were unaffected in non-tropical member countries, while the 1983 ITTA increased total exports for tropical countries. These results together suggest that the sustainability clauses entailed in ITTAs have not decreased total timber exports from member countries, but have shifted exports across timber categories.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10784-017-9373-x
“International Environmental Agreement Effectiveness: A Review of Empirical Studies,” with Helen T. Naughton, Research Handbooks in Comparative Law and Economics, Chapter 18. 2016.
New international environmental agreements are signed and ratified each year. Much effort by policymakers goes into these agreements, yet the literature on their effectiveness is relatively sparse. Further empirical study evaluating environmental agreements is needed to determine their effectiveness. To facilitate future empirical work, a comprehensive search of literature was completed to compile and review existing empirical studies in the field. Many studies rely on simple trend analyses of environmental outcomes, but others use multiple regression analysis to evaluate observed effects of environmental agreements. One important observation from the study is that longer time frame of data facilitates identification of treaty impacts.