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Myera Rashid (Northwestern University): Marriage and the Intergenerational Mobility of Women: Evidence from Marriage Certificates 1850-1910

Abstract: The invention of the typewriter provided entry into the labor force and offices for many young American women in the early 1900s. I find evidence that the typewriter contributed to a persistent increase in women’s labor force participation and other socioeconomic outcomes for women. Beyond access to work in new industries, the technology change also provided women access to a new marriage market that they previously did not have access to. It allowed them to marry men of higher socioeconomic status and subsequently achieve socio-economic mobility.

Hyein Cho (Northwestern University): Limiting For-profit Provision in Nursing Home Markets

Abstract: We study the welfare implication of limiting for-profit provision in the US nursing home industry, a recent policy debate spurred by findings that for-profit providers provide lower quality service than their not-for-profit counterparts. We document that there is a quality and access trade-off, which makes the answer theoretically ambiguous. On the one hand, for-profit providers choose lower quality inputs, which may result in lower quality outcomes. On the other hand, for-profit providers provide access by disproportionately serving the Medicaid population and maintaining larger facilities with more beds. To simulate counterfactual policies, we develop a two-stage game, where providers make entry decisions in the first stage and price and quality choices in the second stage. We show modeling differences in preferences and cost structure is important to capture the primitives driving different observed choices.