Over the past five decades, the labor force participation rate of American men has declined significantly – from 80% in the 1970s to just around 68% today – and similar trends are observed across the developed world. During the same period, the fastest-growing occupations have been those traditionally considered "feminine," such as nursing. Are these two trends connected? Do masculinity norms discourage men from entering the labor force by deterring them from pursuing jobs perceived as feminine? We provide evidence at the macro, micro, and experimental level. At the macro level, we document that male employment participation declined more following sectoral reallocation in more gender-traditional labor markets, as proxied by occupational segregation by gender. At the micro level, we show that gender-progressive men's employment recovers somewhat faster after layoff than that of gender-traditional men, partly through switching into female-dominated industries and occupations. Finally, we are piloting a survey experiment designed to measure men's willingness to pay to avoid occupations perceived as feminine and to assess whether correcting misperceptions about masculinity norms changes this willingness to pay. Understanding the role of masculinity norms in shaping men's labor market decisions is crucial for addressing the ongoing decline in male labor force participation.

Do gender norms lead to an inefficient reallocation of resources? This study investigates the role of gender norms in how households respond to major economic shocks. We leverage rich longitudinal data from the UK on couples' employment, time use, and self-reported gender norms to test whether gender norms prevent households from achieving income-maximizing arrangements after a negative employment shock. We find that, after a layoff, men are more likely than women to return to work in the long run. This asymmetry is fully explained by women who subscribe to traditional gender norms: progressive women have the same labor market response to a layoff as men. 

We provide the first causal evidence that changes to work arrangements – in the form of greater schedule regularity – can reduce the gender earnings gap. The Australian 2009 Fair Work Act explicitly entitled parents of young children to request a change in work arrangements. Leveraging variation in the timing of the law, timing of childbirth, and the bite of the law across different occupations and industries, we establish three main results.  First, new mothers used the Fair Work Act to maintain a regular schedule while reducing hours upon childbirth. Second, thanks to increased regularity, new mothers' hours worked increased by 53%. Third, while this increase in maternal labor supply resulted in a significant shift towards equality in the female- and male-shares of household income, we do not observe any changes in the female share of home production.

We study the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on firms’ innovation, through an event-study analysis of labor market reforms occurring in Europe over 2000-2016. Data from the Community Innovation Survey reveal that substantial drops in EPL for temporary workers prompt a reallocation of innovation towards the introduction of new products, away from process innovation aimed at cutting labor costs. Among innovative firms, the share of product innovators increases by 15% of the pre-reform value, while the share of firms specializing in process innovation falls by 35%. We develop a theoretical framework of directed technical change to rationalize our findings.

[2015, draft available upon request]

I consider an assortative matching model in which workers who differ in ability match with firms which differ in size. I first extend the original (Beckerian) model in order to account for endogenous labor supply choice, and show that in this case positive assortative matching is optimal when the firms' production function is supermodular and the worker cost of effort function is submodular, or vice-versa. I then derive the optimal linear tax rate in presence of assortative matching, and compare it with the tax rate in Rothschild and Scheuer's (2011) Self-Confirming Policy Equilibrium (SCPE), the tax policy believed to be optimal by a government that assumes a frictionless labor market with exogenous wages. I show that the rigidities introduced by assortative matching make the optimal linear tax rate generally larger than the one in the SCPE when the effect on firms' profits is not taken into account (partial equilibrium), but the optimal linear tax rate is typically smaller than the one in the SCPE when general equilibrium effects are considered.