Current Projects

Families, Work, and Welfare States: How Do First Family Transitions Alter Household Income Trajectories?

Abstract: Research on family wage gaps documents male marital premiums and motherhood penalties, but typically treats them as static individual-level events rather than as processes that reorganize household stratification. This article reconceptualizes first family formation as transitions that bind partners’ earnings trajectories, shaped by welfare-state and labor-market contexts. Drawing on roughly two decades of harmonized panel data from six countries (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and South Korea), this study employs event-study models with couple- and individual-level fixed effects. I trace changes in women’s share of couple earnings, individual earnings, and pre- and post-tax household income around first marriage and first childbirth. Findings reveal that across all countries, women’s share of couple earnings declines sharply and persistently following the transition to parenthood. However, the translation of this growing within-couple divergence to household income trajectories varies substantially across contexts. In Europe and Australia, pre-tax incomes fall substantially after childbirth. These income losses are driven primarily by motherhood penalties that are not offset by male premiums. Where buffering occurs, it operates mainly through taxes and transfers rather than labor market returns. In the U.S., accounting for differential pre-birth income growth reveals an otherwise hidden income penalty of approximately 11 percent. In South Korea, female marital earnings penalties complicate narratives of a parenthood income premium. Maternal education attenuates losses primarily in weakly redistributive systems. These findings recast family formation as a central mechanism through which gender inequality is translated into persistent household stratification. 


The Black-White Gap in Lifetime Economic Outcomes  (with Charlotte O'Herron)

Abstract: The persistence of racial economic inequalities in the United States remains a central sociological puzzle. Prior scholarship, focused largely on cross-sectional wage gaps among working men, has interpreted the post-Civil Rights era as a period of convergence that was quickly followed by a stalling in progress by the mid-1970s. However, this approach overlooks the cumulative nature of labor market inequality and the gendered dimensions of racial stratification. Drawing on life course and intersectionality theory, we address these limitations by using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID:1968-2019) to investigate Black-White gaps in lifetime earnings and household disposable income across six birth cohorts of men and women born between the 1930s and 1980s. We find that lifetime racial earnings gaps widened for men in mid-century cohorts, at a time when hourly wage gaps appeared to converge or stagnate and are closely linked to White men’s higher lifetime labor force attachment. For women, earnings gaps are smaller but still meaningful, with labor force attachment also playing a strong role from the 1940s cohort onward. However, racial gaps in lifetime household income among women are considerably larger than among men and are largely explained by unequal access to high-earning partners. These findings suggest that prevailing stylized facts about racial economic inequality understate its magnitude and, at times, obscure periods of widening inequality. This study underscores the importance of an intersectional life-course perspective for understanding how cumulative processes in labor and partnership markets shape racial inequalities in economic command over resources. 


Rethinking the Marital Health Advantage: Evidence Across Institutional Contexts  (with Katarzyna Doniec)

Abstract: Previous research has produced mixed evidence on the health consequences of marriage, largely due to difficulties in disentangling selection from changes associated with union formation and the limited availability of cross-national longitudinal analyses. Using harmonized panel data from the Cross-National Equivalent File (2001–2019) for six countries—the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and South Korea—we compare estimates from pooled ordinary least squares and fixed-effects models, including group- and individual-specific slope specifications, to account for selection on both health levels and trajectories. We also estimate event-study models to examine how health evolves before and after the transition to first marriage, using never-married and pre-marital person-years as the reference category. The positive association between marriage and health observed in pooled models is substantially attenuated once individual fixed effects are introduced, indicating strong selection on baseline health. Accounting for pre-marital health trajectories produces relatively modest changes in average effects but reveals important heterogeneity in dynamic patterns. In particular, trajectory adjustment uncovers a negative association for Australian women and alters the time-path of health following marriage for men in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and South Korea. Overall, the marital health advantage largely reflects selection into marriage rather than a consistent protective effect.  


Missing Mothers - the Impact of excluding mothers’ socioeconomic standing on estimates of intergenerational mobility in middle-income countries (with Luisa Nazareno and Luis Monroy-Gómez-Franco)

Abstract: This study investigates the dynamics of economic intergenerational persistence in Brazil and Mexico. We extend prior research by extending focus from the ubiquitous father-son dyads to incorporate mothers, daughters, and family income into the analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of intergenerational mobility in these two countries that combined account for about half of Latin America’s population. We use a  Two-Sample, Two-Stage Least Squares  (TS2SLS) estimation technique to measure the correlation between the offspring’s and parent’s earnings/income. Our results reveal that estimates which include mother's socioeconomic standing present higher mobility levels than those based solely on father-son correlations. Being a teenager in a single-mother household has a significant negative impact on adult's earnings, however, mobility is higher among this group. We argue for the importance of including women (mothers and daughters) in mobility estimates to paint a comprehensive picture of society-wide levels of intergenerational mobility, particularly considering women's rising labor force participation rates.


From Work to Wealth? Gender, Generation, and the Institutional Structuring of Earnings–Wealth Linkages in the United States and Germany (with Nhat An Trinh)

Abstract: Over the past fifty years, advanced economies have experienced rising wage inequality and the rapid incorporation of women into the workforce. Standard economic theory suggests these shifts should increasingly tether household wealth to individual labor market success. This study investigates whether the structural interdependence between lifetime earnings and peak wealth has intensified across generations and become more gender-symmetric. Using longitudinal data from the United States (PSID) and Germany (SOEP), we estimate rank-rank "conversion elasticities" across four birth cohorts (Silent Generation to Early Gen X) via Unconditional Quantile Regressions. Contrary to expectations of tighter linkages, we find a "convergence via downgrading" for men: while historical earnings-wealth linkages were exceptionally strong, the ability to convert top earnings into elite wealth (the 90th percentile) has rapidly decayed among younger cohorts. For women, the capacity to convert own earnings into wealth remains structurally weak, marked by a rigid, cross-national reliance on partner earnings, though slight generational improvements appear for middle-class German women. Ultimately, these findings reveal that the modern conversion of work to wealth is decoupling at the top and remains deeply gendered, demonstrating that wealth accumulation is heavily mediated by asset dynamics, family formation, and institutional regimes rather than labor markets alone.