A central question in public economics is whether motherhood penalties differ across the wage distribution. Standard theories predict larger penalties among high-wage women due to greater career interruptions and foregone earnings, while lower-wage women should experience smaller losses. Evidence from the United States, however, shows the opposite pattern. We examine whether this gradient persists in two egalitarian welfare states, Norway and Sweden, characterized by generous parental leave, subsidized high-quality childcare, and universal health care. Using population register data from 2016–2020, we compare mothers to childless women and estimate both the overall wage penalty and the marginal penalty per child across the income distribution. We find that motherhood penalties are most pronounced at the lower end of the wage distribution, while they are modest, and even reversed, at the top. These results challenge the welfare state paradox, suggesting that extensive family policies do not fully mitigate compounded disadvantage among lower-wage mothers.

This paper examines how rainfall shocks affect birthweight through maternal labor responses in agricultural communities. Using administrative records covering 2.8 million births in Iran (2014–2017), merged with meteorological and labor data, we address endogenous pregnancy timing via a two-step Heckman selection framework. The first stage estimates conception probabilities based on prior rainfall exposure; the second stage evaluates trimester-specific rainfall impacts on birthweight.

Results show that rainfall fluctuations influence both fertility behavior and fetal health, with heterogeneous effects across climatic regions. Excess rainfall during pregnancy is associated with lower birthweight, consistent with increased maternal workload during productive agricultural periods. Socioeconomic and demographic characteristics are stronger predictors of conception than rainfall, and estimated environmental effects do not significantly after correcting for selection.

By linking environmental risk to labor allocation and human capital formation, the findings inform public finance debates on rural insurance, maternal protection policies, and climate-risk redistribution.

Understanding the causes and consequences of homelessness is central to the design of effective social policies. This paper investigates the relationship between labor market shocks and housing instability by constructing a novel dataset that merges nationwide records of homeless shelter requests with individual-level administrative employment data in France. Leveraging mass layoffs, I document a sharp and persistent increase in the risk of homelessness following job loss. Conversely, exploiting quasi-random variation in housing shocks, I find that losing stable housing leads to a significant decline in subsequent employment and earnings trajectories among those with a recent work history. Together, these results provide evidence of a vicious circle between housing instability and labor market detachment, suggesting that the long-term costs of job loss are amplified by housing market frictions.

We develop a new framework to evaluate income distributions from the perspective of an opportunity-egalitarian planner. This planner faces a costly trade-off between treating people as equals and treating them unequally to equalize opportunities. The resolution of this trade-off depends on the extent of the planner’s inequality-of-opportunity aversion. We use this framework to derive social welfare and inequality measures that are governed by a single parameter capturing the planner's preferences. We bring these measures to the data and analyze inequality of opportunity in the United States. Concretely, we build on the recent literature on intergenerational mobility and study the robustness of its conclusions about time trends and spatial variation in unequal opportunities to assumptions about the planner's preference for equal opportunities. We show that many commonly held conclusions about trends and spatial variation in inequality of opportunity are sensitive to the assumed degree of inequality-of-opportunity aversion.