Job Market Paper

"Pricing the Biological Clock: Reproductive Capital on the US Marriage Market"
Women's ability to have children declines sharply with age. This fecundity loss may negatively affect marital prospects for women who delay marriage to make career investments. I incorporate depreciating "reproductive capital" into a frictionless matching model of the marriage market, where high-skilled women are likely to make pre-marital career investments. When the fertility costs of these investments are large relative to the income gains, the model predicts non-assortative matching at the top of the income distribution, with the highest-earning men forgoing the highest-earning women in favor of poorer, but younger, partners. However, if women's incomes rise or desired family size falls, high-skilled women may be able to compensate their partners for lower fertility, leading to assortative matching. Patterns in US Census data match these predictions. In the 1920-1950 birth cohorts, women with post-bachelors education match with lower-income spouses than women with only college degrees, while in recent years this trend has reversed. The model relies on men internalizing their partners' expected fertility when choosing a mate. I test this using an online experiment where age is randomly assigned to dating profiles, to control for other factors (such as beauty) that change with age in observational data. I find that men, in contrast to women, have a strong preference for younger partners, but only when they have no children of their own and are aware of the age-fertility tradeoff.

Ongoing Projects

"Negotiating a Better Future: Communication Skills and Inter-Generational Investment in Zambia" (More info) (Slides)
With Nava Ashraf and Kathleen McGinn
Funded by USAID Development Innovation Ventures, JPAL Youth Initiative, Grand Challenges Canada, Harvard Women and Public Policy Program, and the International Growth Center

"Intra-Household Impacts of Joint HIV Testing in Western Kenya"
With Markus Goldstein, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Harsha Thirumurthy

"The Parley Before the Conflict: Gender Meets Communication in the Battle of the Sexes"
With Matthew Stephenson
Funded by the Columbia Experimental Laboratory in the Social Sciences

"The Impact of Extended Fertility on Education and Marriage Outcomes: Evidence from Israel's Expansion of IVF Access"

Forthcoming Papers

"What Happens the Morning After? The Costs and Benefits of Expanding Access to Emergency Contraception"
With Tal Gross and Jeanne Lafortune, forthcoming in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management

Other

"The Effects of Home-Based HIV Counseling and Testing on HIV/AIDS Stigma among Individuals and Community Leaders in Western Kenya: Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Trial"
With Cristian Pop-Eleches, Winnie Rono, Evan Plous, Angeli Kirk, Samson Ndege, Markus Goldstein, and Harsha Thirumurthy. AIDS Care, Special Issue: Effects of Investing in Communities on HIV/AIDS Outcomes, 25:S1 (2013)