Stefania Albanesi

Gender Roles and Medical Progress

Maternal mortality was the second-largest cause of death for women in childbearing years until the mid-1930s in the United States. For each death, 20 times as many mothers suffered pregnancy-related conditions, which made it hard for them to engage in market work. Between 1930 and 1960 there was a remarkable improvement in maternal health. We argue that this development, by enabling women to reconcile work and motherhood, was essential for the joint rise in women’s labor force participation and fertility over this period. We also show that the diffusion of infant formula played an important auxiliary role.

How Severe is the Time Inconsistency Problem in Monetary Policy

We analyze two monetary economies - a cash-credit good model and a limited participation model. In our models, monetary policy is made by a benevolent policymaker who cannot commit to future policies. We define and analyze Markov equilibrium in these economies. We show that there is no time inconsistency problem for a wide range of parameter values.

Gender roles and medical progress

Maternal mortality was the second-largest cause of death for women in childbearing years until the mid-1930s in the United States. For each death, 20 times as many mothers suffered pregnancy-related conditions, which made it hard for them to engage in market work. Between 1930 and 1960 there was a remarkable improvement in maternal health. We argue that this development, by enabling women to reconcile work and motherhood, was essential for the joint rise in women’s labor force participation and fertility over this period. We also show that the diffusion of infant formula played an important auxiliary role.

The Gender Unemployment Gap

The unemployment gender gap, defined as the difference between female and male unemployment rates, was positive until 1980. This gap virtually disappeared after 1980, except during recessions when mens unemployment rate always exceeds womens. We study the evolution of these gender differences in unemployment from a long-run perspective and over the business cycle. Using a calibrated three-state search model of the labor market, we show that the rise in female labor force attachment and the decline in male attachment can mostly account for the closing of the gender unemployment gap. Evidence from nineteen OECD countries also supports the notion that convergence in attachment is associated with a decline in the gender unemployment gap. At the cyclical frequency, we find that gender differences in industry composition are important in recessions, especially the most recent, but they do not explain gender differences in employment growth during recoveries.

Credit Growth and the Financial Crisis: A New Narrative

A broadly accepted explanation for the 2007-09 financial crisis emphasizes the growth in lending to subprime households during the preceding boom. According to this view, the resulting rise in insolvencies and foreclosures caused the financial crisis, leading to a decline in housing values and a broad contraction in credit. This paper studies the evolution of household borrowing and delinquency between 1999 and 2013, using a large administrative panel of credit file data. Our findings suggest an alternative narrative that challenges the large role of subprime credit. We show that credit growth between 2001 and 2007 is concentrated in the middle and high quartiles of the credit score distribution. Borrowing by individuals with low credit score is virtually constant for all debt categories during the boom. We also find that the rise in defaults during the financial crisis is concentrated in the middle and upper quartiles of the credit score distribution, and the fraction of defaults to the lowest quartile of of the credit score distribution sizably drops during the crisis. We discuss the broader implications of these findings for the role of housing collateral in the propagation of the crisis.