Abstract: I examine how couples' decision-making shapes the aggregate and distributional impacts of local trade shocks. Using the PSID, I document two novel facts about the China Trade Shock: (i) a couple moves only when the husband is exposed to the shock; and (ii) the wife's labor force participation rises when her husband is exposed and falls when she is exposed herself. I then build a quantitative spatial model in which couples choose jointly where to live and whether the wife works. In the model, the shock raises real wages and draws more people into work. I compare this baseline economy with an economy populated only by single individuals, calibrated to the same short-run aggregate moments. In my model, the wife's labor supply responds to the rise in relative wages between men and women, so aggregate employment gains are 15.4% smaller in the long run.  At the same time,  14.9% more people move to a different state because husbands are the main earners and unexposed wives move with their spouse. As the China Trade Shock hits male-intensive manufacturing, joint decision-making redistributes gains from wives to husbands and, through wages, from married to single women.
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Abstract: I examine whether exporting to more gender-equal countries changes gender equality within exporting firms. I combine matched employer-employee and customs data for Chile with natural disasters in importing countries, which shift firms' export shares. Firms that export to more gender-equal destinations employ a larger share of women but have fewer women among their top earners, widening the gender wage gap. Firms exporting to the most gender-equal countries have a 10% higher share of female employment than other exporters. To understand these facts, I build a quantitative heterogeneous-firm trade model in which firms hire women and men as workers and managers, and three channels can shape whom firms hire: gender-equal destinations may demand products that happen to use more women, their buyers may reward firms for employing women, and destinations with few shared business hours may make female managers costlier. Without these channels, firms' selection into destinations accounts for only about 7% of the estimated association between destinations' gender equality and female employment. When buyers reward gender equality, Chile's trading partners matter: lower trade costs with more gender-equal countries raise the share of female employment, whereas lower trade costs with less gender-equal countries reduce it. Since 2016, Chile has included gender chapters in its trade agreements, mostly with Latin American partners that are less gender-equal than Chile. Including them in agreements with more gender-equal partners would at least double the chapters' effect on female employment.

(Draft pending disclosure by the Central Bank of Chile)

Abstract: We study how parents adjust their labor supply following family separation and how child support shapes these adjustments in a context of high labor informality. In such settings, child support policies tied to observable earnings can create incentives to work informally. We build a new dataset from child support and family court records in Ecuador, then link it to administrative labor-market and census data. Using a matched difference-in-differences design comparing separating parents with similar parents in stable unions, we find that formal employment among fathers, who are the child support payers, declines by 5% one year after separation, while mothers’ formal employment increases by 6%. Two additional pieces of evidence suggest that household dissolution alone cannot explain fathers’ decline in formal employment. First, fathers’ formal employment also declines relative to individuals who separate without entering child support. Second, a similar decline occurs when child support begins without contemporaneous household dissolution. We find that fathers’ lower formal employment largely reflects reallocation toward informal work, while mothers increase their overall labor-market attachment. To inform child support policy design, we specify and estimate a new model of household employment and separation that incorporates how formality matters for both the amount of child support set and its enforcement. The model shows that the enforcement mechanism matters more for fathers’ sector choices than how obligation amounts are set.
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