Working Papers
Who Responds to Universal Pre-K? Heterogeneous Employment Effects on Mothers
Abstract: Universal Pre-K (UPK) programs give free public preschool to three- and four-year-olds. Free care can pull mothers into the labor force by cutting the price of watching their kids during the work day --- but only for mothers who were already paying something close to that price. This paper asks which mothers actually change their work behavior when a state rolls out UPK. Combining CPS and ACS data from 1990--2019 with the staggered rollout of eight state and local UPK programs, and using the extended two-way fixed effects estimator (ETWFE), I find that UPK raises maternal employment by 0.76 percentage points on average. The effect is concentrated among mothers most likely to have already been paying for care: married mothers (2.76 points) and college-educated mothers (1.21 points) respond far more than their counterparts, and mothers with more than one child (1.63 points) respond far more than mothers with just one. These patterns fit a simple story: UPK works mainly as a price cut on formal childcare that already-paying mothers can act on, not as a uniform subsidy that moves every mother's employment by the same amount.
Shifting Gears: Bicycle Distribution Schemes and Secondary Education in India (with Shivangi Sarkar)
This project examines whether state bicycle distribution schemes improve cycling to school and secondary-school outcomes in India. Using variation in scheme eligibility across states, gender, and rural-urban groups, the analysis first estimates effects on cycling to school using National Sample Survey data and then studies schooling outcomes using ASER. A complementary West Bengal case study uses district-level Sabooj Sathi bicycle distribution data to estimate whether higher treatment intensity increases enrollment and age-grade progression.
Works in Progress
The Impact of a Licensing Felony Ban on Recidivism
Many states require workers to acquire a license in different fields to work in that profession. Among other requirements, one that stands out is that some states have bans on any individual with a criminal history of any felony. Using the National Corrections Reporting Program, I look at the impact of the removal of all felony bans in Illinois to see if removing these barriers affected the recidivism rate within the state. Strangely, using a synthetic difference in differences model I find that recidivism rates spiked in the state after the removal of the blanket felony bans rather than decreased. I then attempt to explain this by looking at whether the removal of blanket felony bans led to more specific felony bans and restrictiveness.
From Doulas to Nurse-Midwives: An examination of the effects of scope of practice on maternal mortality rates
A growing literature shows that scope-of-practice expansions for midwives and other mid-level providers improve maternal and infant health outcomes on average, but none of this work asks whether these gains reach the populations facing the highest baseline risk. This question is particularly salient given the well-documented history of "granny midwives" serving Black communities in the rural South, and the persistence of a Black-white maternal mortality gap that remains among the largest health disparities in the United States today. Using variation in the timing of state adoption of full practice authority laws for certified nurse-midwives, we plan to examine whether these policy changes disproportionately improve outcomes for Black mothers relative to white mothers, and whether effects are concentrated in counties that have lost hospital-based obstetric care. This project extends my focus on how policies affecting access to healthcare providers shape outcomes for disadvantaged populations from the Indian context of my other work to a domestic policy setting