Speaker: Itzik Fadlon, University of California, San Diego

Seminar Date: 3/25/24

Causal Effects of Early Career Sorting on Labor and Marriage Market Choices: A Foundation for Gender Disparities and Norms

Abstract: We study whether and how early labor market choices determine longer-run career versus family outcomes differentially for male and female professionals. We analyze the physician labor market by exploiting a randomized lottery that determines the sorting of Danish physicians into internships across local labor markets. Using administrative data spanning ten years after physicians’ graduations, we find causal effects of early-career sorting on a range of life cycle outcomes that cascade from labor market choices, including human capital accumulation and occupational choice, to marriage market choices, including matching and fertility. The persistent effects are entirely concentrated among women, whereas men experience only temporary career disruptions. The evidence points to differential family-career tradeoffs and the mentorship employers provide as channels underlying this gender divergence. Our findings have implications for policies aimed at gender equality in outcomes, as they reveal how persistent gaps can arise even in institutionally gender-neutral settings with early-stage equality of opportunity.

Itzik Fadlon is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego and a Research Associate in the programs on Aging and Public Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His primary fields of interest are public finance, health economics, and labor/family economics. His work studies household behavior and the effects of government policies, as well as how these impacts on households’ behavior translate to the optimal design of social policies. A main agenda in his research focuses on studying economic and health disparities across race/ethnicity, gender, and geography, and how to design well-targeted public policies to enhance the livelihood of underrepresented groups and traditionally underserved communities. His work has been published in leading journals such as American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Review, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics. Itzik received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in May 2015. Before joining UCSD in 2016 as an Assistant Professor, Itzik spent a year as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Disability Policy Research at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and he spent the academic year of 2019-2020 as a Visiting Scholar in Aging and Health Research at the NBER funded by NIH/NIA. (https://pages.ucsd.edu/~yfadlon/)