Tímea Laura Molnár

I study how parents' perceptions of the technology of child skill formation shape their responses to a shock to the opportunity cost of their time in parenting. I show that when daycare became cheaper in Quebec in 1997, parents bought more child goods (daycare, books) and allocated more time to their children, and highly educated parents increased their parenting time even more. To explain these findings, I develop a model of parents' time allocation, wherein the productivity of parenting time (PPT) depends on parents' education, innate parenting ability, and mental health. My structural estimates reveal that parents perceive parenting time and child goods as complements in child skill formation, and believe their PPT to increase with schooling. If PPT is fixed when daycare price falls, skills are expected to rise more for children of highly educated parents, where most of the rise stems from more parenting — and not daycare — time. Thus, complementarity magnifies the role of a daycare price policy, and heterogeneous PPT widens expected early childhood skill gaps.

To see if earlier return to work after childbirth helps mothers' careers, we exploit a Hungarian policy reform that allowed mothers to keep maternity benefits even if they resumed work before their child turned two, creating a financial incentive to return earlier without reducing benefit levels. Such a unique setting enables us to isolate the Substitution Effect inherent in paid parental leave. Using a Triple-Differences Event Study design and administrative linked employer--employee data, we compare the outcomes of mothers who were eligible and ineligible based on the timing of their child’s birth, pre- and post-birth, relative to childless women. We find a 3.1 percentage point (31 percent) rise in employment 19–24 months after childbirth, with no effects on later births or long-term employment. We find positive wage effects and/or sorting into higher-paying firms 3--5 years after childbirth for the groups of mothers who were more likely to work in months 19--24, e.g., for those who gave birth after age 30, worked in white-collar jobs, had above-median wages, or were employed at higher-paying firms. Yet, most women also sort into less managerial occupations with lower time pressure. Thus, earlier return also shapes mothers’ careers by influencing the types of roles and firms they sort into.

We study how compensating wage differentials vary with labor market tightness. Using administrative data from Hungary, we construct a firm-level measure of injury risk as a proxy for workplace disamenities and estimate a marginal willingness to pay for this amenity of 5%. We show that compensation for this workplace disamenity is strongly cyclical. As labor markets tighten, the wage premium at high-injury firms rises significantly. A five percentage point decline in the unemployment rate increases compensation by 1.1%, equivalent to about 20% of the marginal willingness to pay of the amenity. Despite this, high-injury firms experience persistently higher separation rate, indicating that workers are undercompensated in slack labor markets and reallocate toward higher amenity jobs as labor market tighten. Tighter labor markets widen wage differentials by increasing compensation for disamenities, while reducing utility dispersion across jobs at the same time.

We shed light on the STEM puzzle – boys being overrepresented in STEM fields although girls outperform them in school – by studying dynamic rank effects by gender on mathematics-related outcomes: when students enter a new high school class, does the effect of their primary-school rank persist or does their new rank supersede it? We use unique Hungarian administrative data in which the same student is observed among all their classmates in both primary and secondary school. We compare the effect of mathematics rank among primary-school classmates at the end of Grade 8 with that of among new high-school classmates in Grade 9, fixing Grade-8 score. Our design separates persistence of earlier rank from updating among new peers. We uncover a novel gender asymmetry for the timing of rank signals: later rank matters relatively more than earlier rank for girls, and the opposite holds for boys. For boys, underrepresented in the fierce academic high school track, primary-school rank drives STEM choice, indicating the “big-fish-little-pond” mechanism. For girls, overrepresented in the academic track, only high-school rank drives STEM choice, suggesting that girls need a strong positive signal in a competitive environment about their mathematics abilities to choose STEM. Thus, higher mathematics high-school-class rank for girls may reduce the STEM gender gap. Suggestive evidence points to mechanisms of less anxiety and stronger self-esteem for girls and more internal Locus of Control for boys.

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I study voluntary delays in the school entry of age-eligible children (academic redshirting), using Hungarian administrative test score and medical prescription data, and mental health surveys. I identify a new Local Average Treatment Effect of starting school a year older due to redshirting, by exploiting a school-readiness evaluation required only for potentially redshirted children born before January 1. Instrumenting with post-January 1 births, I estimate effects for non-school-ready children who could overcome developmental deficits with redshirting but are deterred by the evaluation. I find improved test scores, high school track choices, educational aspirations, and graduation rates -- but only for boys, who are also less anxious, more confident, and less bullied. Redshirting thus shrinks gender gaps, such as closing the high school completion gap by 60 percent.

To analyze how short absences from work affect workers' labor trajectory, we use linked employer-employee administrative data from Hungary with rich administrative health records, and unexpected and mild accidents with no permanent labor productivity losses as exogenous drivers of short absences. Our Event Study results show that, relative to the counterfactual of no accident, short (1--5-months long) periods of absence after accidents decrease wages by 1 percent in the first two years after return to work, which are driven by missed internal promotions in small firms and missed opportunities to move to higher-paying firms for workers in large firms.

We document two COVID-19–related risks, viral risk and employment risk, and their distributions across the Canadian population. The measurement of viral risk is based on the VSE COVID-19 Risk/Reward Assessment Tool, created to assist policy-makers in determining the impacts of pandemic-related economic shutdowns and re-openings. Women are more concentrated in high-viral-transmission-risk occupations, which is the source of their greater employment loss over the first part of the pandemic. They were also less likely to maintain contact with their former employers, reducing employment recovery rates. Low-educated workers face the same viral risk rates as high-educated workers but much higher employment losses. This is largely due to their lower likelihood of switching to working from home. For both women and the low-educated, existing inequities in their occupational distributions and living situations have resulted in them bearing a disproportionate amount of the risk emerging from the pandemic. Assortative matching in couples has tended to exacerbate risk inequities.

In this paper, we exploit the geographical pattern of primary school reopenings during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada to estimate the impact of school reopenings on parental employment and work hours. We use a triple-difference approach, in which we first compare parents of primary-school children in regions where schools reopened to similar parents in regions where schools remained closed and add parents of older, secondary-school children as an additional control group. We estimate the impact of school reopenings separately for mothers and fathers, and for single parents and parents living in dual-parent households. We find a positive impact of school reopenings on employment and on actual hours worked. The effects tend to be stronger for single mothers, but are also present for mothers and fathers in dual-parent households in the spring of 2020. Overall, single mothers experienced an 18 percentage point increase in their employment at work rate following school reopenings. We also split our sample according to whether the job can be done from home, and find stronger impacts for those whose jobs cannot easily be done from home.

One of private health insurers’ main roles in the United States is to negotiate physician payment rates on their beneficiaries’ behalf. We show that these rates are often set in reference to a government benchmark, and ask how often private insurers customize their fee schedules away from this default. We exploit changes in Medicare’s payments and dramatic bunching in markups over Medicare’s rates to address this question. Although Medicare’s rates are influential, 25 percent of physician services in our data, representing 45 percent of covered spending, deviate from the benchmark. Heterogeneity in the pervasiveness and direction of deviations suggests that the private market coordinates around Medicare’s pricing for simplicity but abandons it when sufficient value is at stake.