Description:

Kelly Strada (Northwestern University): "Role Mothers: Intergenerational Transmission of Attitudes towards Work"

Abstract: Do women pay a social cost for working? Are children of working women disadvantaged or empowered? In this project, I exploit the WWII draft lottery to attain individual-level variation in the labor supply decisions for the wives of draft-eligible men. Specifically, I construct a novel wartime measure of labor force entry—SSN first issuance—and combine it with data on army enlistment and war supply contracts. By exploiting within-labor market variation in the demand for female work over time and the timing of one’s husband conscription, I can assess the ex-ante ambiguous long-term consequences of being (a child of) a working woman, as measured in restricted-access longitudinal censuses and surveys.

*All fall lunches will take place via zoom