This dissertation consists of three chapters addressing questions related to women’s socioeconomic outcomes. In scope, it covers the context of both developed and developing economies. In the first chapter I study the extent to which greater availability of remote work opportunities alleviates childbirth related costs for women’s careers and affects their fertility choices. I formulate a structural dynamic life-cycle model that incorporates women’s joint decision-making regarding fertility and employment type choices. The model is estimated through simulated method of moments using NLSY97 data. I find that mothers of children under 5 years old face a significantly higher disutility of work when they work in jobs which require on-site presence compared to jobs that allow the flexibility of working from home. I use the estimated model to simulate the effect of policies that affect the availability of remote work jobs. I find that extending the flexibility of remote work to all mothers of pre-school children increases their employment by 4%, albeit with negligible gains in women’s overall labor market participation. In contrast, increased supply of remote work jobs improves labor market participation for all women unconditional on fertility status. The model also implies that increased availability of remote jobs leads to increased fertility rates, confirming the upward fertility trend recently observed during COVID-19.

The second chapter is joint work with Brielle Bryan. Qualitative research suggests that mothers play a critical role in supporting adult children both during and after experiences of incarceration, yet the implications of incarceration for the parents of incarcerated individuals have been relatively unexplored in existing research. Using mother-child linked data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult study, we investigate whether and why child incarceration appears to influence maternal wealth. We find a significantly negative relationship between child incarceration and maternal wealth. This relationship, however, is highly heterogeneous across forms of wealth. Separate models by race and ethnicity suggest that child incarceration may be much more detrimental in dollar terms for white women, but the financial asset penalty associated with child incarceration is larger in percentage terms for black women.

The third chapter studies the marriage market in Pakistan. In Pakistan, parents and elder members of a family exert a significant amount of influence in searching for marriage matches for their daughters and deciding who their daughters will marry. In this joint work with Rossella Calvi and Eeshani Kandpal, we use a hypothetical choice methodology to estimate parental preferences for various marital attributes. Our results show that parents in Pakistan prefer grooms who belong to their family which is consistent with the high prevalence of consanguineous marriages in Pakistan. We also show that parents have a high preference for marriage offers which grant their daughters a greater degree of decision making power in their marital households.