Victoria Raskin
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Working Papers

 Sorting in the Marriage Market: The Role of Inequality and its Impact on Intergenerational Mobility [Paper]
I study the long-run impacts of a trade-induced increase in marital sorting. First, I exploit heterogeneous effects by gender and education of a trade-induced labor demand shock to test how changes in inequality affect assortative mating. I find that increased men's skill premium leads to increased sorting in the marriage market, as it deters marriages between college-educated women and high-school-educated men. Second, I study the potential long-term consequences of increased sorting on intergenerational mobility. I present suggestive evidence that marriages in which both spouses have a college degree invest more time and resources in their children, and their children outperform others from an early age. Increased sorting can then lead to higher inequality in children's initial human capital development, lowering intergenerational mobility. I develop an Aiyagari-style overlapping-generations life-cycle model with an explicit marriage market to estimate the long-run effect of the trade shock on intergenerational mobility. The model, estimated to the US in the 2000s, implies that the trade-induced increase in assortative mating can reduce intergenerational mobility by 0.9%.

Female Leadership in Times of COVID, with Sahar Parsa. [Paper coming soon!]
We use data from the website Glassdoor to study how employee satisfaction changed at the onset of the COVID pandemic. We conduct text analysis on employee reviews and find that the pandemic has not changed what workers care about the most in their jobs: benefits, their team, the firm's culture, work-life balance, and flexibility. Consistent with working-from-home improving several of those dimensions, we find employee satisfaction increased within weeks of the pandemic's start. Additionally, we find that with the pandemic, workers started also caring about the firm's leadership and whether they felt supported and cared for. Because research finds men and women differ in their leadership styles, with the latter being more likely to empathize with their employees, we further study how the change in satisfaction varied by the presence of women leaders in their firms. Using a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we find that the increase in satisfaction was greater for workers in companies led by women.

Work in progress

The Retreat of High-school Educated Women from the Labor Force
The life cycle of high-school-educated women’s labor-force participation (LFP) has changed in recent decades. For cohorts born after 1970, the decline in LFP during the childbearing years is more pronounced and is not followed by a subsequent recovery, whereas previous cohorts or contemporary college-educated women did see subsequent recoveries. I develop a quantitative life-cycle model with habit formation in LFP preferences as a function of the time previously worked to study the role of increased time investments in children on long-term labor-force participation decisions. I estimate the model for the 1960 cohort and use it to quantify the effects of increased skill premium faced by later cohorts on their LFP decisions. As the returns to human capital increase and mothers spend more time with kids in the early ages, the habit cost of returning to the labor force increases. The income gains of returning to the labor market are sufficient for college-educated women, but not high-school-educated women, to return.
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