Data visualizations from work-in-progress research. Source code available on GitHub or via request.

Gender norms and joint household labor choices

Early stage exploration of US household labor data. THe goal is to understand why there is a persistent gap in the time spent working (and subsequently earned income) between men and women. This gap seems to experience a kink around the 80th percentile where women slow or stop working. These individuals, sometimes known as tradwives, seem to only exist when the household is unconstrained. Further investigation is needed to test whether, when households jointly optimize their decisions to work outside the home, there is a male gender norm - such that the household gains utility from a male spouse working more than the female spouse.

Estimating the informal economy in California

This work is a rough estimate of the informal economy in California. By comparing taxable PCE data from household survey data at the effective local tax rate to the reported amount of tax revenue by the state, it is a the first attempt to model California’s informal economy. The method is based on the VAT-based measurements of tax evasion in Europe (Pappada & Rogoff 2023).