Qin Lin

Research

Childcare Availability During Nonstandard Hours and Household Choices (JMP)

Around 28% of all workers and 46% of low-educated workers with young children experience nonstandard work schedules, including evenings, nights, or weekends. However, childcare options are limited during these schedules. The core trade-off faced by households with young children during nonstandard schedules is higher wages due to the schedule premium but limited access to high-quality low-price childcare. Focusing on households with young children aged four and younger, I estimate a model of household maternal labor supply, childcare arrangements, and child skill development, allowing for heterogeneous wages, availability of childcare, and price-quality distributions during different schedules. This paper first estimates the magnitude of the schedule premium to range from 3.8% to 22.3%, depending on education and gender. The estimated model indicates that variations in childcare quality between standard and nonstandard schedules are crucial for understanding household behaviors. Having high-quality provider care available during nonstandard hours would significantly enhance the well-being of lower SES households. Suppose Head Start (a higher-quality care option) is available during nonstandard hours and accessible to all eligible lower SES households. In that case, mothers in this group are 5% more likely to participate in the labor force, 20% more likely to enroll their children in formal provider care, and their children’s skills improve by around 24%.

Unstable Leisure Complementarity and Dual Career Couples’ Joint Retirement Behavior

In this paper, I use the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data and build a dynamic life-cycle model to analyze how dual-career couples jointly make their retirement decisions, seriously considering the heterogeneous and unstable preferences for joint leisure. I follow the stream of literature that explains joint retirement behavior through leisure complementarity between couples. Contrary to previous findings that couples always enjoy joint leisure and prefer to retire together, the estimates in this paper show that when people have a low preference for joint leisure, they even experience distaste for shared leisure time. When the wife has a low preference for joint leisure, her leisure is only half as enjoyable when her husband has retired than when her husband is still working. When the husband has a low preference for joint leisure, his leisure is only 0.93 times as enjoyable when his wife has retired than when his wife is still working. The wife’s preferences for joint leisure are relatively more stable than the husband’s. The findings also show that preference for joint leisure has a significant impact on the probability of working. Disutility from joint leisure can potentially be vital for explaining the older population’s labor participation behavior.  

Collaborative Robots in the Workplace: Occupational, Geographic, and Demographic Opportunities for Technology Adoption (with Lindsay Jacobs, Natalie Duncombe) submitted to Strategic Management Journal

We focus on the emerging collaborative robot technology and develop an index, which we call the Cobot Adoption Potential Index (CAPI), of the potential that occupations have for the adoption of collaborative robots, or “cobots.” Using data from O*NET, the American Community Survey (ACS), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), we estimate the feasibility of cobot adoption across occupations of various characteristics. We illustrate how CAPI can be used to assess (1) cobot adoption potential at regional levels, (2) evaluate how easily cobots integrate with workers in these occupations based on worker characteristics, and (3) the potential of cobots to improve workplace safety.

Child Care Policy and Informal Care (with Joel McMurry) [Updated Draft Coming Soon]

Early childcare experiences vary widely across the distribution of socio-economic status (SES), and sizable skill gaps open up before children enter publicly-provided schooling. SES gradients in the quality of informal, relative-provided care are particularly large. To understand how variation in the availability and quality of informal care contributes to skill inequality, we estimate a model of child care, mother labor supply, and child skill development, allowing for unequal access to informal care. We exploit the timing of grandmother deaths relative to a child’s birth to identify substitution patterns between informal, formal, and mother-provided child care. We quantify the effect of having access to informal care on child development and mother labor supply, and we estimate that, for a substantial fraction of less-advantaged children, the availability of informal care is detrimental to skill development. We ex ante analyze the effects of policies such as universal public daycare, subsidies for formal care, and cash transfers, and show that accounting for heterogeneity in the availability and quality of informal care is quantitatively important for estimating the effect that such policies might have on skill inequality at the point of entry into K-12 schooling.

Occupation Choices of Young Parents (with Zhuoli Chen)