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Title: Essays on the Spatial Economics of the Family
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Venator, Joanna
Essays on the Spatial Economics of the Family
Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2021
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): Dual-Career Families; Earnings, Husbands; Earnings, Wives; Geocoded Data; Household Structure; Migration

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

In this dissertation, I study how household's decisions about where to live vary across household structure and impact marriage and fertility decisions.

The first chapter examines how married couples' migration decisions differentially impact men's and women's earnings and the role that policy can play in improving post-move outcomes for trailing spouses. I use a difference-in-differences methodology to show that access to unemployment insurance for trailing spouses increases the likelihood that households move by 2.3 p.p. and improves the post-move labor market outcomes of women. I then build and estimate a structural model of dual-earner couples' migration decisions to evaluate the effects of a series of counterfactual policies. I show that increasing the likelihood of joint distant offers substantively increases migration rates, increases women's post-move employment rates, and improves both men and women's earnings growth at the time of a move.

The second chapter explores the role that joint geographic constraints play in dual-earner household migration decisions. I develop a measure of joint geographic constraints adapted from a pairwise occupational co-agglomeration index and demonstrate that being well-matched to one's spouse in terms of occupation clustering is positively associated with earnings for women and secondary earners. I show that higher values on the co-agglomeration index is associated with higher mobility rates for dual-earner households as well, consistent with the theory that occupational sorting impacts married couple's ability to overcome dual-earner migration frictions.

Bibliography Citation
Venator, Joanna. Essays on the Spatial Economics of the Family. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, The University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2021.