Working Papers
Women in Science. Lesson from the Baby Boom (with Petra Moser) | Revise & Resubmit at Econometrica
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This paper investigates how children affect women in science, using biographies in the American Men of Science (MoS 1956), linked with publications. First, we show that mothers have a unique lifecycle pattern of productivity: While other scientists peak in their mid-30s, mothers become less productive at that age and reach peak productivity in their early-40s. To investigate the causal effects of children on productivity, we estimate event studies of marriage, comparing mothers and fathers with other married scientists. Event study estimates show that the productivity of mothers declines until children reach school age, while there is no effect on fathers. These differences have important implications for tenure and participation: Just 27% of mothers achieve tenure, compared with 48% of fathers and 46% of other women. When women carried the full burden of childcare, the time costs of raising the baby boom led to a great loss of female scientists.
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More Public Goods or Less Property Taxes? The Politics of Land Registration in Nigeria | Job Market Paper
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Abstract forthcoming
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Strengthening Property Tax Bases with Market-Based Revisions to Property Appraisals: Evidence from the Philippines
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Scarce property sales data in developing countries drive an overdependence on self-declared property values that are prone to undervaluations, resulting in underutilized property tax collections. While solutions like improved market data or increased land surveys exist, they tend to be costly and time inefficient. Instead, I investigate whether alternative market-based property appraisal methods that depend less on such data can provide governments with outsized returns to their property taxes. To do this, I combine administrative fiscal data on all cities in the Philippines with policy variation from a land-management project that made substantive market-based advancements in property appraisal methods. I find cities that adopt such revisions experience a 17.7% increase in property taxes, with the effect being particularly strong in data-scarce environments. In rural areas, which depend more on self-declared valuations, cities experience substantively higher increases of 25.1%. However, these effects don’t persist in the long-term, suggesting that governments may have to address the political and legislative barriers surrounding property reappraisals before reaping the full benefits to their property tax bases.