Research

Working Papers

2025

1. Labor

   The Future of Work: Remote Opportunities and Female Labor Force Participation

   Meng Song

   Preparing for Submission

   Abstract Draft Presentation Schedule

   This paper has been or will be presented at the following:
   1/27/25: University of Connecticut Economics Department, HeLD Seminar.

   This paper examines the long-term effects of the accelerated adoption of work-from-home opportunities brought about by the pandemic on female labor force participation. It aims to explore whether the rise in remote work opportunities can explain the observed resilience and recent growth in female labor force participation and to investigate whether women were more adversely impacted or ultimately benefited more from work-from-home arrangements. Using a difference-in-differences and event study design, this paper exploits variation at the local labor market area (LMA) level pre- and post-pandemic, comparing individuals in LMAs with higher work-from-home potential to those in areas with lower work-from-home opportunities. My findings reveal that WFH opportunities have a significant and positive impact on female labor force participation, particularly for mothers and mothers with young children. At the LMA level, a one-standard-deviation increase in WFH opportunities is associated with a 0.32 percentage point increase in the probability of a female individual participating in the labor force. The effects are more pronounced for mothers (0.41 percentage point increase) and are largest for mothers with children under 5 (0.86 percentage point increase). Additionally, younger women achieve the greatest benefits from WFH, with effects decline with age; meanwhile, highly educated mothers of young children benefit the most, whereas women with lower educational attainment face structural barriers limiting their ability to fully leverage remote work opportunities.

2. Education

   Four-day School Week, Student Achievements, and Teacher Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Colorado

   Ozkan Eren,  Meng Song , and Ruinan Zhao

   Manuscript in Preparation

   Abstract

   The four-day school week policy has gained increased attention among school districts in recent years. While existing literature has examined its effects on primary school students’ test scores, health, and risky behaviors in the short run, the impacts on high school students and teachers remain unclear. Utilizing administrative data of students and teachers, we leverage the quasi-randomness of the four-day school week implementation and employ a difference-in-difference approach to explore the causal impacts of the four-day school week on high school students’ academic achievements and teacher labor market outcomes. Our findings reveal that the adoption of the 4-day school week increases dropout rates, reduce freshman college enrollment, but has no statistically significant impact on on-time graduation rates. We further illustrate the policy impacts on teacher retention, recruitment, and productivity. Additionally, we present suggestive evidence that the duration of exposure to the four-day school week, along with the implementation strategy, play an important role in influencing both student and teacher outcomes.

3. Climate

   The Global Impacts of Climate Change on Risk Preferences

   Wesley Howden, Remy Levin, and  Meng Song

   Undergoing Major Rewrite

   Abstract Draft

   We study the direct impacts that long-run experiences of climate change have on individual risk preferences. Using panel surveys from Indonesia and Mexico (total N = 25,000), we link within-person changes in elicited risk preferences to state-level, lifetime experiences of climate change. In line with the predictions of a Bayesian model of learning over background climate risk, we find that in both settings increases in the experienced means of temperature and precipitation cause significant decreases in measured risk aversion, while increases in the experienced variance of temperature in Indonesia and the variance of precipitation in Mexico lead to significant increases in measured risk aversion. We replicate this analysis globally using a survey with a representative sample from 75 countries (N = 75,000) containing an elicited measure of risk preference which we link to country-level, lifetime climate experiences. We find significant results for both the means and variances of both climate variables that are consistent with our panel analyses. Across all settings, experiences of climate variance have first-order effects, with coefficient magnitudes of the standard deviation of climate 0.6-2.6 times that of the climate mean. We develop a novel method for estimating the welfare effects of observed risk preference changes using panel data, and find that the climate-induced changes in risk preferences we observe increased welfare in both Indonesia and Mexico by approximately 1%.