Tom Zohar

I am an Associate Professor in Economics at CEMFI, and a Research Affiliate at CESifo, Inclusion Lab, Laboratorio de Oportunidades. I work on labor market inequality and its relationship with workers' mobility. I am also interested in the role of social norms on fertility decisions and it's implications to labor supply. I received my PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 2021.

Publications

Working Papers

Work in Progress

CV

Email

tom.zohar[at]cemfi[dot]es

Publications

Quantifying the Role of Firms in Intergenerational Mobility

(Conditionally Accepted at AEJ:Applied (forthcoming))

with Caue Dobbin

Audio summary

CESifo Working Paper

Firm's wage premium are highly correlated with parental earnings.

Access to better-paying firms is responsible for 22% of the intergenerational earnings elasticity, half of which due to skill-based sorting.

Working Papers

Women's Autonomy and Abortion Decision-Making

(R&R at Journal of Political Economy)

with Nina Brooks and Caue Dobbin

Audio summary

Abortion subsidies act as a financial bypass for parental consent.

Why? women don't need to consult parents with strict attitudes towards abortion, allowing them to have an abortion in private.

Children of Immigrants: Intergenerational Mobility Across Countries

(R&R at the American Economic Review)

Coordinators: Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Mathias Fjællegaard Jensen, Alan Manning, Santiago Pérez

Spain team: Jaime Arellano-Bover, Javier Soria Espín, and Tom Zohar

Audio summary

We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation.

Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differential rates of absolute mobility.

The Complementary Role of Information and Contraceptive Access in Teen Pregnancy

(R&R at Journal of Development Economics)

with Sevin Kaytan and Stwarth Piedra Bonilla

Audio summary

What explain the large reduction in teen-birth?

Shift info source from parents to healthcare professionals in conservative districts, mitigate misinformation and risky behaviors.

On Causal Inference with Model-Based Outcomes

with Dmitry Arkhangelsky and Kazuharu Yanagimoto

Audio summary

R package (unitdid)

Why & how should we use model-based outcomes?

1-step estimators are inconsistent for group-level policy outcomes derived from microdata, but two-stage Minimum Distance estimators yield valid inference.

Separations Revisited: Do Layoffs or Quits Drive Lower Separation Rates in High-Quality Firms?

with Daniel Fernandez and Caue Dobbin

Audio summary

Answer: Layoffs! a stylized fact we name the `quality-layoff correlation'

What explains the quality-layoff correlation? The interaction of wage rigidity and worker productivity shocks generate inefficient layoffs that decline with firm quality.

Postpartum Depression and the Motherhood Penalty

with Sonia Bhalotra, Meltem Daysal, Louis Fréget, Jonas Cuzulan Hirani, Priyama Majumdar, Mircea Trandafir and Miriam Wüst

Audio summary

Postpartum depression turns a health shock into a persistent economic scar

This penalty is driven by workforce exits among mothers with lower education or less family friendly jobs.

Selected Work in Progress

Trading Present for Future: The Long-term consequences of Sex Work

with Nina Buchmann and Sevin Kaytan

Policy Reports

Digital Inclusion and Labor Market Performance: An Experimental Evaluation -- pilot project in Spain

with Miguel Almunia and Aleksei Samkov

Audio summary

Contact

Location

C. Casado del Alisal, 5 Madrid, Spain, 28014

Email

tom.zohar[at]cemfi[dot]es

Tom Zohar