A homework assignment for ECON1000 that analyzed how children affect women's and men's career opportunities. This is to this day the R-based project I am most proud of and the narrative space allowed me to express all my distress and further research about women's role in the job market and the unsettling phenomena of child penalty.
"Child penalty" -> "Significance of having children on employment and earning rates and the contrast between these changes for men and women"
For this assignment, I examined:
- childbirth and labor statistics data to determine the child penalty in earnings and employment by gender and year
- examine other factors that could better or worsen the effect of child penalty beyond gender
Tools:
- Difference-in-differences model
- Difference-in-differences regression
This course will show how "big data" can be used to understand and address some of the most important social and economic problems of our time. The course will give students an introduction to frontier research and policy applications in economics and social science in a non-technical manner that does not require prior coursework in economics or statistics, making it suitable both for students exploring economics for the first time, as well as those with more experience. Topics include equality of opportunity, education, racial disparities, effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, health care, climate change, criminal justice, and tax policy (https://www.coursicle.com/brown/courses/ECON/1000/).
The Opportunity Atlas was publicly released in 2018 and has since become a widely used tool among policymakers, journalists, and researchers. Developed by economists at Harvard and the U.S. Census Bureau, the Atlas maps the outcomes of children born between 1978 and 1983 — such as income, college attendance, and incarceration — based on where they grew up.