Mindy Marks

Motherhood and Female Labor Supply in the Developing World: Evidence from Infertility Shocks.

We introduce a new instrument for family size, infertility, to investigate the causal relationship between children and female labor force participation. Infertility mimics an experiment where nature assigns an upper bound for family size, independent of a womans background. This new instrument allows us to investigate the differential labor supply without restrictions on initial family size. Using the Demographic and Health Surveys from 26 developing countries we show that OLS estimates are biased upward. We find that the presence of children affects neither the likelihood of work nor its intensity, but impacts the type of work a woman pursues.

Minimum Wages, Employer-Provided Health Insurance, and the Non-discrimination Law

This article exploits cross-state variation in minimum wages to investigate the impact of minimum wage changes on employer-provided health insurance. In contrast to the existing empirical literature, this article considers an environment where some firms are constrained by non-discrimination laws that govern the provision of health insurance. For these firms, minimum wage changes do not reduce the probability that workers will receive employer-provided health insurance. For firms not covered by the non-discrimination law, and free to tailor their fringe benefits, low-skilled workers experience a disproportionate reduction in the availability and generosity of health insurance after a minimum wage increase.