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j-humanresources.bsky.social
The JHR
@j-humanresources.bsky.social
80 followers 38 following 82 posts
The Journal of Human Resources is a leading journal in empirical microeconomics, with a focus on policy-relevant research.
https://jhr.uwpress.org/
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j-humanresources.bsky.social
New moms in the US lose about $2,000 in earnings two years after giving birth. Seth Murray, Danielle H. Sandler &
Matthew Staiger find that this “motherhood penalty” is unchanged no matter how many female executives are at the top. #FeaturedArticle
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Female Executives and the Motherhood Penalty Seth Murray, Danielle H. Sandler, and Matthew Staiger We use U.S. linked survey and administrative data to investigate whether the sex composition of a firm’s executives affects the earnings of new mothers. Our empirical strategy compares the earnings trajectories of new mothers to observably similar coworkers who did not give birth around that time. On average, mothers earn almost $2,000 less per quarter two years after birth, but the magnitude of these losses is unrelated to the female share of executives at the mothers’ employer. Our results suggest that increasing the representation of women in firms’ leadership positions will not reduce the motherhood penalty.
November 14, 2025 at 6:24 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Can taking antidepressants for #PostpartumDepression really help new moms long-term? Janet Currie & Esmée Zwiers find: not always - many keep using medications and struggle at work after childbirth. #OpenAccess
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Medication of Postpartum Depression and Maternal Outcomes Evidence from Geographic Variation in Dutch Prescribing Janet Currie and Esmée Zwiers We use data on more than 420,000 first-time Dutch mothers to examine the effects of postpartum antidepressant use. Dutch general practitioners must be available for house calls. We therefore instrument a woman’s receipt of antidepressants postpartum with local practitioners’ propensity to prescribe antidepressants to women 46–65. Ordinary least squares suggests negative effects of postpartum antidepressants, but this is due to selection into treatment. Instrumental variables estimates indicate that the marginal treated patient is likely to continue taking antidepressants long term and is less likely to be employed in the year after birth, with little evidence of other effects.
November 12, 2025 at 2:53 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
#MonetaryIncentives for raising girls can change lives! Nabaneeta Biswas, Christopher Cornwell, & Laura Zimmermann found that the Dhanlakshmi scheme boosted girl births, education & health. #OpenAccess
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The Power of Lakshmi Monetary Incentives for Raising a Girl Nabaneeta Biswas, Christopher Cornwell and & Laura V. Zimmermann Worldwide, 1.6 million girls are “missing” at birth every year. One policy tool to improve the sex ratio is a conditional cash transfer that pays parents to invest in daughters, but existing evidence on their effectiveness is sparse. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we evaluate the Dhanlakshmi scheme, an Indian CCT program that strongly encouraged girl births without restricting fertility. Dhanlakshmi improved the sex ratio at birth, with only a small fertility increase. The girl-birth effect was concentrated among the first two parities and partially persisted after the program was discontinued. Post-birth outcomes like immunization and education also improved.
November 10, 2025 at 2:34 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Can smarter #nutrition information and nudges help stop #ChildhoodObesity in the Global South? A recent study by Pham Khanh Nam, Brandon Restrepo, Matthias Rieger, and Natascha Wagner say yes - especially for girls! #OpenAccess
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Can Information Enhanced with Nudges Mitigate the Rise of Childhood Obesity in the Global South? Pham Khanh Nam, Brandon J. Restrepo, Matthias Rieger, and Natascha Wagner We conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to test whether updating nutrition information sets of parents along with nudges reduces excess body fat among primary schoolchildren in urban Vietnam. Parents of overweight or obese children were randomly offered a nutrition consultation that led to goal setting with soft commitment, BMI-for-age report card, and weight scale. After six months, the intervention reduced body fat, waist circumference, and the likelihood of being overweight or obese, which are partly explained by improvements in diets and diet-related parental perceptions. Anthropometric improvements are concentrated among girls—partly operating through achievement of dietary goals—and persisted after 22 months.
November 7, 2025 at 5:52 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Closing the parent-school info gap boosts grades & attendance! Samuel Berlinski, Matias Busso, Taryn Dinkelman
& @claupma.bsky.social found that weekly texts to parents help at-risk students thrive. #ParentalEngagement #OpenAccess
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Reducing Parent–School Information Gaps and Improving Education Outcomes: Evidence from High-Frequency Text Messages Samuel Berlinski, Matias Busso,Taryn Dinkelman & Claudia Martínez A. We conducted an experiment in low-income urban schools in Chile to test the effects and behavioral changes triggered by a program that sends attendance, grade, and classroom behavior information to parents via weekly and monthly text messages. Our 18-month intervention raised average math scores by 0.09 of a standard deviation and increased the share of students satisfying attendance requirements for grade promotion by 4.7 percentage points. Treatment effects were larger for students at higher risk of later grade retention and dropout. Our results demonstrate that communicating existing school information to parents frequently can shrink parent–school information gaps and improve school outcomes in a light-touch, scalable, and cost-effective way.
November 6, 2025 at 5:18 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Presenteeism isn’t just a buzzword - it’s a barrier. Ghazala Azmat, Lena Hensvik, and Olen Roseqvist find that when job flexibility lags, the gender gap widens, especially after parenthood. #OpenAccess #GenderEquality
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Workplace Presenteeism, Job Substitutability, and Gender Inequality Ghazala Azmat, Lena Hensvik, Olof Rosenqvist This work explores how the parenthood wage penalty is partially explained by an increased within-couple gap in job uniqueness (that is, the within-establishment substitutability of workers). Uniqueness is rewarded with higher wages, but it requires worker presenteeism (that is, the lack of unpredictable work absences), which entails a higher cost of childbearing. Using a within-couple event study approach, we show that after the arrival of the first child, women take more days of absence than men, and their likelihood of holding jobs with low substitutability decreases. We find that 15 years after childbearing, the male–female gender gap in holding a (higher-paying) unique job increases by six percentage points. The results suggest that structural changes towards greater work flexibility, making it less costly for workers in unique jobs to not be present, can help to reduce the parenthood wage penalty.
November 3, 2025 at 3:20 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Can schools change faith? Benjamin Arold, @woessmann.bsky.social & Larissa Zierow find that ending mandatory #ReligiousEducation reduces adult #religiosity by 7%. Students earn more, work longer hours, but pray less and skip church.
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Can Schools Change Religious Attitudes? Evidence from German State Reforms of Compulsory Religious Education Benjamin W. Arold, Ludger Woessmann and Larissa Zierow We study whether compulsory religious education in schools affects students’ religiosity as adults. We exploit the staggered termination of compulsory religious education across German states in models with state and cohort fixed effects. Using three different datasets, we find that a reform abolishing compulsory religious education significantly reduced the religiosity of affected students in adulthood. It also reduced the religious actions of personal prayer, church-going, and church membership. Beyond religious attitudes, and consistent with a shift towards worldly norms and economic activities, the reform led to higher labor-market participation and earnings. By contrast, the reform did not affect ethical and political values or non-religious school outcomes.
October 29, 2025 at 2:08 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
What happens when women are more #educated than men? Finnish data studied by @anarodriguezg.bsky.social found that #marriage rates drop 1.1% and men have 1.4 fewer kids. Are we ready for this shift?
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The Impact of the Female Advantage in Education on the Family Ana Rodríguez-González Men’s historical advantage in educational attainment has recently been reversed in many countries. I study the implications for family formation of the new female advantage in education in the marriage market, exploiting a Finnish school reform that increased women’s relative level of education. I analyze the reduced-form relationship between marriage market exposure to the reform and family outcomes. I find decreases in marriage and fertility in marriage markets with a larger female educational advantage. These results are mostly driven by the mismatch between the educational distributions of men and women, and might have negative consequences for low-educated men’s mental health.
October 27, 2025 at 2:42 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Geography = #privilege in disguise. Jon Valant & Brigham Walker found that when Black and white families apply to the SAME school in New Orleans, white kids are 9% more likely to get in. Even with “choice,” the system isn’t equal.
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Setting Priorities in School Choice: How Placement Algorithms Affect Enrollment Patterns by Race and Family Income Jon Valant and Brigham Walker Even in cities with expansive school choice reforms, historically disadvantaged groups of students enroll in substantially lower-performing schools than their peers. We examine this phenomenon in New Orleans, focusing on the applications that families submit and the placements that result. We find large gaps in the types of schools that families request. Additionally, when Black and White (and poor and nonpoor) families request the same first-choice school for kindergarten, White and nonpoor families are more likely to receive those placements. This results from student priorities in the system’s placement algorithm. We examine these priorities and simulate placements under different policies.
October 24, 2025 at 6:05 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
The hidden scars of war run deeper than we thought.
Mevlude Akbulut-Yuksel, @erdaltekin.bsky.social & Belgi Turan
found that children exposed to WWII bombing before age 5 have 16% higher rates of #depression 70+ years later.
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World War II Blues The Long–lasting Mental Health Effect of Childhood Trauma Mevlude Akbulut-Yuksel, Erdal Tekin and Belgi Turan There has been a revival of warfare and threats of interstate war in recent years as the number of countries engaged in armed conflict surged dramatically, reaching levels unprecedented since the end of the Cold War. This is happening at a time when the global burden of mental health illness is also on the rise. We examine the causal impact of early life exposure to warfare on long–term mental health, using novel data on the amount of bombs dropped in German cities by Allied Air Forces during World War II (WWII) and the German Socio-economic Panel. Our identification strategy leverages a generalized difference-indifferences design, exploiting the plausibly exogenous city-by-cohort variation in the bombing intensity experienced by the former West German cities during the war as a quasi- experiment. We find that cohorts who were five years old or younger during WWII have significantly poorer mental health outcomes later in life, when they are in their late 50s to 70s. Specifically, an increase of one standard deviation in the bombing intensity experienced during WWII is associated with about a 10 percent decline in an individual’s long–term standardized mental health score. This effect is equivalent to a 16.2 percent increase in the likelihood of being diagnosed with clinical depression. Our investigation suggests that factors such as the increased burden on the healthcare system, and economic losses during WWII exacerbate the adverse impact of bombing exposure on long–term mental health. Conversely, war relief funds transferred to municipalities following the war have a mitigating impact.
October 23, 2025 at 3:51 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Are #SNAP studies missing a hidden problem? Christian A. Gregory and Martijn van Hasselt show misreported participation nearly doubles effect estimates AND uncertainty about #DietQuality impacts. We might know less than we think!
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Bayesian learning in the presence of misreporting and endogeneity The case of SNAP participation and diet quality Christian A. Gregory and Martijn van Hasselt We examine the role of survey misreporting in a study of the impact of SNAP participation on diet quality. Our Bayesian econometric model allows for endogenous and possibly misreported program participation. The prior distribution incorporates information about misreporting rates and selection into treatment based on recent related work in this area. In our empirical analysis of NHANES data, we do not find clear evidence for an average causal effect of SNAP participation on diet quality. Changes in prior beliefs about the degree of misreporting, however, have a substantial impact on the precision of inference.
October 21, 2025 at 6:37 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
When jobs disappear, talent flows to #teaching!
Christa Deneault's study tracking 2.6 million Texas teens found higher #unemployment = higher quality teachers entering the profession.
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Local Labor Markets and Selection into the Teaching Profession Christa Deneault Using administrative data from Texas, I track individuals from high school through college to the workforce to determine the effects of local labor markets on occupational choice. I find local labor market conditions are countercyclical with selection into teaching. Individuals sorting into teaching because of poor local labor market conditions are of higher ability (standardized tests) and have higher productivity (value-added). The findings suggest local labor market fluctuations shape career decisions well before individuals participate in the labor market, and increasing the relative economic standing of teaching as a career has the potential to improve the future supply of teachers.
October 17, 2025 at 1:31 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
#AirPollution INSTANTLY cuts kids' math scores by 1.8% and reading by 0.9% - even at "safe" WHO levels!
Christina Andersen, Jørgen Brandt, Jesper Christensen, Lise Frohn, Camilla Geels, Timo Hener, @msimonsen.bsky.social & Lars Skipper find no threshold exists. doi.org/10.3368/jhr....
Air Pollution and Cognition in Children Evidence from National Tests in Denmark Christina M. Andersen, Jørgen Brandt, Jesper H. Christensen, Lise M. Frohn, Camilla Geels, Timo Hener, Marianne Simonsen and Lars Skipper This paper examines the effects of daily outdoor air pollution variation on student test scores. Using Danish register data for all elementary and lower secondary students, we link home addresses to a 1 km x 1 km pollution grid to measure test day and lifetime pollution exposure. An increase in fine particles (PM2.5) from a very clean to an average day reduces math scores by 1.8% and reading scores by 0.9% of a standard deviation. Even at low pollution levels, student performance is harmed, especially in math. We find no evidence of heterogeneity by health, socio-economic status, or lifetime exposure.
October 15, 2025 at 2:03 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
9 months in the womb can't be replicated. @moallecon.bsky.social & Syeda Warda Riaz find that kids exposed to #CashTransfers in utero stay taller for life, while those who start late never catch up. Invest early or miss the window forever!
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The Health Effects of In Utero Exposure To Cash Transfers Mo Alloush and Syeda Warda Riaz We study the effects of in utero exposure to a large cash transfer program on the health of children. Using data from South Africa, we use the age-eligibility threshold of the Older Person’s Grant and the variation in age differences between children and a coresident elderly to show that in utero exposure to the cash transfer led to a 0.26 SD increase in height-for-age of children. Among older children, we leverage the variation in the timing of the start of benefits to show important out-sized benefits of in utero exposure compared to starting later in early life. These results are robust to a variety of different checks including controlling for endogenous household formation. Given the importance of early child health in determining long-term outcomes, our results suggest that extending child-specific cash transfer programs to pregnant mothers can have long-term positive impacts.
October 13, 2025 at 1:36 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Adding four #MentalHealth treatment centers per county reduces police officer assaults by 1.3%! More access = safer communities. Monica Deza, Thanh Lu, Johanna Catherine Maclean & Alberto Ortega find benefits twice as big in #HighUnemployment areas.
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Treatment for mental health and substance use Spillovers to police safety Monica Deza, Thanh Lu, Johanna Catherine Maclean and Alberto Ortega We study the effect of community access to mental health and substance use treatment on police officer safety, proxied with on-duty assaults on officers. Police officers often serve as first-responders to people experiencing mental health and substance use crises, which can place police officers at risk. Combining agency-level data on police officer on-duty assaults and county-level data on treatment centers that offer mental health and substance use care, we estimate panel fixed-effects regressions. An additional four centers per county (the average annual increase observed in our data) leads to a 1.3% reduction per police agency in on-duty police officers assaults.
October 10, 2025 at 2:00 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Cash grants beat job training? A 3.5 year study in Rwanda by Craig McIntosh & @andrewzeitlin.io found both helped youth start businesses, but COVID wiped out half the gains. Neither escaped poverty. Liquidity matters – but so do bigger structural barriers.
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Skills and Liquidity Barriers to Youth Employment: Medium-term Evidence from a Cash Benchmarking Experiment in Rwanda Craig McIntosh and Andrew Zeitlin We present results of an experiment benchmarking a workforce training program against cash transfers for underemployed young adults in Rwanda. 3.5 years after treatment, the training program enhances productive time use and asset investment, while the cash transfers drive productive assets, livestock values, savings, and subjective well-being. Both interventions have powerful effects on entrepreneurship. But while labor, sales, and profits all go up, the implied wage rate in these businesses is low. Our results suggest that credit is a major barrier to self-employment, but deeper reforms may be required to enable entrepreneurship to provide a transformative pathway out of poverty.
October 6, 2025 at 7:25 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Does #Tourism actually create jobs?
@libertadgonzalez.bsky.social and Tetyana Surovtseva find that a boost in tourism creates #jobs in hotels and restaurants but eliminates them in manufacturing.
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Do More Tourists Promote Local Employment? Libertad González and Tetyana Surovtseva We analyze the impact of tourist flows on local labor markets, following a novel identification strategy that uses temporary shocks in alternative international destinations to instrument for tourism flows across Spanish regions. We find that a one standard deviation increase in tourist inflows leads to a 1 percentage-point increase in employment in the tourism industry and in other services, but it does not increase total employment, labor force participation, or wages in local economies. Instead, the positive impact on services is compensated by a fall in employment in other industries, most notably manufacturing.
October 3, 2025 at 1:32 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Does #Politics matter more than race in #Hiring?
Martin Abel, @andrearobbett.bsky.social and @dfstone.bsky.social found that employers penalize workers from opposing parties by 7.5% – nearly as much as the college degree premium.
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Partisan Discrimination in Hiring Martin Abel, Andrea Robbett and Daniel F. Stone This study experimentally investigates the role of politics in hiring decisions. Participants acted as employers, determining the highest wage to offer candidates based only on their demographic characteristics, education, and partisanship. We find that both Democratic and Republican participants significantly favor co-partisans, with an out-partisan wage penalty of 7.5%. Discrimination is consistent across tasks that focus respectively on competence, shirking, feedback responsiveness, and voluntary effort, and appears largely driven by biased beliefs about partisan productivity, while affective polarization is also predictive of the out-partisan wage penalty. Discrimination does not increase in a treatment where workers benefit financially from being hired.
October 1, 2025 at 2:27 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Our assumptions about bad influences need updating. Sarah Font and Christopher Mills found that that 20% of young prison inmates spent time in #FosterCare, but this does NOT increase #CrimeRates.
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Safe from Harm? Peers and Criminal Capital Formation in Congregate Foster Care Sarah Font and Christopher Mills More than 20 percent of young adult prison inmates in the United States have spent ;me in foster care, among whom a majority have lived in a congregate care (group-based) seCng. In these seCngs, youth are exposed to non-related peers, who may influence long-term social and behavioral outcomes. Using three decades of administra;ve data from Wisconsin and exogenous varia;on in the rela;ve imprisonment risk of foster care peers, we study how peer composi;on affects youths’ future criminal jus;ce system contact, educa;onal aLainment, and short-term risky behavior. We consider peer composi;on along three dimensions: (i) the share of peers placed in foster care for delinquency-related reasons, (ii) machine learning predic;ons of the future probability of imprisonment, calculated using pre-placement child and family characteris;cs, and (iii) the share of peers with formerly imprisoned parents. We find that peer characteris;cs have no effect on a youth’s likelihood of entering prison by age 20, nor on a number of other indicators of deviant behavior. These results hold across group homes, residen;al facili;es, and temporary placement seCngs, and are rela;vely robust to placement length and youth demographics. A one standard devia;on increase in predicted peer imprisonment risk is associated with a modest, marginally significant one percentage point (three percent) increase in a youth’s likelihood of dropping out of high school. Our findings have implica;ons for the recent movement to reallocate children away from congregate care.
September 30, 2025 at 3:49 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Does #NeighborhoodDiversity matter for #Assimilation? Pascal Achard finds living in native-heavy areas increases #CulturalIntegration by just 1.6% – much smaller than the 51 point gap between groups.
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Exposure to Natives and Cultural Assimilation Pascal Achard This paper studies whether a lower presence of natives during immigrants’ childhood and adolescence impedes their cultural assimilation. I examine a culturally charged consumption - the usage of hormonal contraceptives by young immigrant women - and leverage the quasi-random allocation of asylum seekers in the Netherlands to identify causal effects. While exposure to native peers has a positive effect on educational attainment, I find at most a modest effect on cultural outcomes in this context. Results from alternative identification strategies confirm that exposure may not have a large effect on cultural assimilation.
September 29, 2025 at 7:38 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Culture shapes #FamilyInvestment choices.
@collinsmatthew.bsky.social found that having a brother reduces #Education for first-born boys by 0.05 SD in cultures where sons don’t inherit from their fathers. When sons can’t inherit, parents compensate with more education.
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Sibling Gender, Inheritance Customs and Educational Attainment Matthew Collins This study identifies the causal effect of second-born gender on the education of first-born children and how it varies across traditional inheritance customs in 27 sub-Saharan African countries. When customs dictate that sons do not inherit from fathers, having a brother causes a 0.05 SD reduction in education. For boys who inherit, having a brother reduces inheritance, for which parents substitute greater educational investments. For first-born girls whose brother can inherit, having a brother causes a 0.028 SD reduction in education. Exploiting national legal reforms, I show that sibling gender effects converge when all children can inherit from their parents.
September 24, 2025 at 1:46 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Growing up with #FoodInsecurity makes you more likely to face it as an adult. Robert Paul Hartley, Jaehyun Nam & Christopher Wimer found it increases the probability of adulthood food insecurity by 10%. This persistence is linked to lower #CollegeAttendance and SNAP take-up.
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The Persistence of Food Security Status Across Generations Robert Paul Hartley, Jaehyun Nam and Christopher Wimer The persistence of disadvantage across generations is a central concern for social policy in the United States. While an extensive literature has focused on income mobility, much less is known about the persistence of material hardship. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate the intergenerational persistence of food insecurity. Childhood food insecurity is associated with at least 10 percentage points higher probability of food insecurity as an adult, with estimates varying by severity of childhood exposure, life-course timing, and accounting for endogeneity and underreporting. We explore potential mechanisms behind this persistence related to perceptions, behaviors, and human capital.
September 22, 2025 at 2:48 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
What happens when schools fail? It might be good. Ozkan Eren, David Figlio, Naci Mocan & @orgulozturk.bsky.social
found schools that failed their #AccountabilityRating saw a lasting reduction in students' adult #CriminalActivity - they were 12% less likely to be arrested.
doi.org/10.3368/jhr....
School Accountability, Long-Run Criminal Activity, and Self-Sufficiency* Ozkan Eren, David Figlio, Naci Mocan and Orgul Ozturk This paper examines the impact of school accountability on adult crime and economic self-sufficiency. We employ a unique source of linked administrative data from a Southern state and exploit exogenous variation generated by the state‘s accountability regime. Our findings indicate that a school‘s receipt of a lower accountability rating, at the bottom end of the ratings distribution, decreases their students‘ criminal involvement and the likelihood of being incarcerated in adulthood. However, we do not find any meaningful relationship between a lower accountability rating and enrollment in social welfare programs. Further examination of the mechanisms reveals that accountability pressures prompted schools to implement policies that led to changes in school climate.
September 18, 2025 at 3:21 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Younger siblings with an older sister? You’re in luck! A new study on rural Kenyan households by Pamela Jakiela, @owenozier.bsky.social, Lia Fernald & Heather Knauer found that having an older sister (vs. older brother) improves children's vocabulary and #MotorSkills.
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Big Sisters Pamela Jakiela, Owen Ozier, Lia C. H. Fernald and Heather A. Knauer We model household investments in young children when parents and older siblings share caregiving responsibilities and investments by older siblings contribute to young children’s human capital accumulation. To test the predictions of our model, we estimate the impact of having an older sister (as opposed to an older brother) on early childhood development in a sample of rural Kenyan households with otherwise similar family structures. Having an older sister rather than an older brother improves younger siblings’ vocabulary and fine motor skills by more than 0.1 standard deviations.
September 17, 2025 at 1:57 PM
j-humanresources.bsky.social
Algorithms might speed up #ChildWelfare decisions. Maria Fitzpatrick, Katharine Sadowski and Christopher Wildeman conducted a randomized control trial in Colorado and found algorithmic tools saved caseworkers about 30 seconds per case – helpful in an overburdened system.
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Algorithms and Decision-making Evidence from Child Maltreatment Reports Maria D. Fitzpatrick, Katharine Sadowski and Christopher Wildeman Around 40% of children experience maltreatment (Finkelhor et al. 2013), with harmful outcomes and high social costs. Child protection decisions are complex, and potentially biased and/or prone to errors due to underfunding and overload. Our randomized controlled trial showed algorithmic tools sped up decision-making but didn't significantly change child outcomes, perhaps because COVID disruptions limited outcome analysis. Results are suggestive that risk aversions played a role: high-risk cases flagged by the tool were more likely screened in, while low-risk cases weren’t more likely screened out. Time savings from the tool could enable caseworkers to spend more time directly with families.
September 16, 2025 at 1:51 PM