As the US population continues to age, parental caregiving will become more prevalent and falls primarily on female family members to provide such care. In this paper, I explore how elder parental health shocks impact adult children’s parental caregiving and labor market outcomes by gender. Using parental health information from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), I develop a novel summary measure of parent health that compiles many possible shocks and demonstrate its application to other datasets, such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). After a shock, daughters provide twice as much parental care as sons. A gender gap in earnings emerges after a substantial shock and is larger after more severe shocks. This earnings effect is driven by adjustments among employed adult children, as employment is only modestly effected by a shock. In particular, employed children do not meaningfully change their occupation, industry, or hours worked after a shock. Further, more generous public spending on caregiving for older adults decreases caregiving among daughters but does not impact sons' caregiving. 

We use Luxembourg Income Study and International Social Survey Programme microdata on 27 countries over the 1986-2019 period, augmented by policy and labor market information, to estimate the impact of family-friendly policies on gender gaps in employment, wages, earnings, and part-time work, as well as child penalties in employment and earnings. We find that longer duration of parental leave generally lowers gender gaps in wages, employment, earnings, and child penalties in employment and earnings, except for high levels of this entitlement, where further increases in leave raise gender gaps. We also find that the right to request a part-time work schedule raises relative female part-time employment but lowers employment and earnings gender gaps. Higher government expenditures for childcare lower employment, earnings, and part-time employment gender gaps as well as child employment and earnings penalties. These results are generally stronger for the less educated than for the highly educated, possibly reflecting higher costs of taking time off for highly educated women. Finally, expansion of family-friendly policies over this period can account for 24-33% of our sample’s reduction in gender gaps in employment and earnings and 46-76% of the reduction in child penalties in these outcomes. The slower expansion of such policies in the United States than elsewhere accounts for 6-15% of the slower reduction in US gender employment and earnings gaps and 20% of the slower fall in the US child employment penalty.

Between 1940-1970, an estimated 4 million black people moved out of the South during the second wave of the Great Migration. At this time, black women were largely employed in the household service sector, and the labor force participation of white women was rapidly evolving during this period. In this paper, I study how an influx of black female migrants out of the South affected the labor market outcomes of white women and incumbent black women who were already in Great Migration destination places. Further, I investigate how this effect interacts with the restrictiveness of the receiving labor market, comparing places with(out) a state anti-discrimination law, equal pay law, and higher (lower) measures of historical racial animosity. Following Derenoncourt (2022) and Jutt and Parman (2024), I construct a plausibly exogenous shift-share instrument by gender that leverages historical patterns of out-migration interacted with economic push factors from the South using historical census data from 1940 to 1960. After an influx of black female migrants, white and black incumbent women's employment decreases more in places with less restrictive labor markets. These results indicate that black migrant paid work substituted for the paid work of white and black incumbent women in labor markets where black migrants increasingly competed with white and black incumbent women. Despite the effect on female labor market outcomes, I find that white women's family formation patterns were not significantly affected by this migration shock. 

Although the gender gap in employment and wages has converged significantly, such gains have stagnated in recent decades in the US. Women often find it difficult to juggle their work and personal caregiving responsibilities amid high child care costs and a lack of flexible scheduling (Schochet 2019). This paper explores the effect of right to request laws in the US on scheduling practices, earnings, and employment outcomes. Although employers are not required to grant such requests, these laws potentially give workers more access to flexible work accommodations and more input into their work schedules. Using the adoption of right-to-request state laws and city ordinances and cross-sectional survey data, I compare women in treated locales to women in control locales, using a differences-in-differences\event study framework.