Jheelum Sarkar

I study how exposure to remote work affects fertility outcomes in the United States. Exploiting variation in occupation-level remote-work potential and combining 2016-2023 data from the Current Population Survey, I estimate dynamic difference-in-differences models that compare fertility changes among women in occupations with higher versus lower remote-work potential before and after the COVID-19 shock. For every one-standard-deviation increase in remote-work potential, women experienced nearly 0.5 additional births per 1,000 women during the pandemic and 0.3 additional births per 1,000 women in the post-pandemic period. Decomposing fertility by birth order, I find positive effects for both first births and higher-order births during the pandemic: first births rise by about 0.4 births per 1,000 women, while higher-order births rise by about 0.5 births per 1,000 women. In the post-COVID period, higher-order birth estimates remain positive, at about 0.4 births per 1,000 women, but are less precisely estimated. The effects are concentrated among women in prime childbearing ages, especially ages 25-34, and are stronger among women with college education and above-median income. Key estimates remain robust across alternative remote work measurements. These results suggest that remote work can relax trade-offs between career and family formation, but the gains from flexibility are unequal across socioeconomic groups.

Several developing countries lack task-based surveys at detailed occupation levels. This paper develops new occupation-level telework scores for emerging economies, where the non-pecuniary cost of working outside is very high for women. Using the textual descriptions of 3,448 detailed occupations in the Indian occupation manual, I train a supervised text classifier to estimate a telework score for each occupation. I find that 36.6% of occupations have moderate to high telework potential. Software engineering, product design, management, and research-based occupations exhibit the highest telework potential, while physically intensive occupations such as machine operators and construction workers rank the lowest. This ranking remains consistent with alternative measures derived from large language model (LLM) analysis. Extending the methodology to two other large emerging economies, namely Brazil and China, I find similar occupations ranking at the top and bottom of the distribution. Applying this occupational classification to 96 other countries, I find that teleworkable jobs are concentrated in countries with higher urbanization, internet connectivity, and income per capita. These findings demonstrate that occupation manuals can substitute for task-based surveys in measuring telework potential, an important input for studying the implications of telework shaping labor markets in emerging economies.

Over the past three decades, extreme climate events have caused losses of worth USD 4.5 trillion. Using collective bargaining model, I find that the gendered labour supply response to adverse shocks is not straightforward since it depends on relative strength of income and substitution effects of men's and women's participation. Using a panel of 151 countries (1995-2019), I examine how extreme climate conditions shape gender gap in labour force participation. This study finds that the gender gap in paid labour exhibits a U-shaped relationship with droughts and an inverted U-shaped relationship with extreme wet conditions. The drought pattern is primarily driven by gender gap in employment while wetness affects gender gap in participation through unemployment. These relationships vary with country characteristics. Countries with high disaster-displacement risk exhibit declining gender gaps in participation during excess wetness while moderate-risk economies experience expanded gaps during droughts. Furthermore, the drought U-shape is most pronounced in countries with low to moderate empowerment while the nonlinear wet responses is concentrated only in moderately empowered countries. Lastly, both droughts and excess wetness expands gender gap in countries with weak net resilience to climate shocks.

Catastrophic floods directly risk 1.8 billion lives worldwide, most of whom are from East and South Asia. How do extreme floods reshape paid labor outcomes? To answer this, I focus on a 1-in-100 year flood event in India. I first combine Sentinel-1 SAR with JRC Global Surface Water dataset to generate flood map. Using information from this map in various rounds of periodic labor force surveys, I estimate gender-specific dynamic effects of the flood shock. Key results show that men experienced short-lived reduction in their employment while women faced a delayed but persistent decline in their working hours. Men suffered most in secondary sector and increased their participation in primary sector. Women were hit hardest in the tertiary sector. Such sectoral impacts could be attributable to disruptions in infrastructure and physical capital. Moreover, marital status and dependency burden further shape the gender differential effects of the extreme flood event. Results remain robust under alternative treatment definitions.

This article examines the complex relationship between climate change and economic inequality, exploring both cross-country and within-country scenarios. Changes in average temperatures and precipitations are identified as significant contributors to cross-country inequalities. Several studies have also employed greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, particularly carbon dioxide emissions, as an indicator of global warming. These studies show that the relationship between cross-country inequality and global warming is mixed and primarily depends on the pre-existing income levels of the countries being compared. The sudden onset of climate events exacerbates economic inequalities within a country. However, the extent of this impact varies depending on the adaptive capacities, occupation, and gender of individuals dwelling in the affected regions. In the case of within-country scenarios, gender emerges as a pivotal factor in the climate-inequality nexus, influencing labor division and accessibility to social infrastructure. This review highlights the multifaceted nature of the climate-inequality nexus and emphasizes the importance of incorporating both economic and social factors to inform effective policy interventions.