Beyond Jonathan Deng
data analysis, mathematical modeling, and queer economics
I am an Economic Studies Senior Research Assistant with the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. I hold a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Williams College. My research interests include family policy with a focus on the impacts of unemployment on intra-household bargaining and labor supply. I enjoy using and learning econometric programs to clean and analyze messy data. Click here to learn more about me!
Working Papers
This paper formally models and analyzes the heterogenous impact of an exogenous unemployment shock on men and women’s time spent in housework. Using household fixed effects models, I find that married women spend 6.4 additional hours on housework when they become unemployed while married men only spend an additional 3.4 hours on housework. This gendered impact also appears among singles, although they have a smaller response to their unemployment shock compared to their married counterparts. The presence of children greatly amplifies the gender gap in housework hours and may lead more working women to voluntarily reduce their market work to assume domestic responsibility. Finally, I find some evidence that more generous unemployment insurance may offset this increase in housework hours for wives, albeit quite minimally. These overall results indicate that gender norms associated with housework and childcare greatly influence the unequal distribution of housework and highlight the challenges to women’s future work hours and re-employment.
This research builds upon the ongoing literature documenting the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on social and economic outcomes within the United States. In particular, we examine the effects of government mandated lockdown and reopening policies at the county level by using daily information on total consumer spending and employment levels as well as county shutdown and reopening dates. We employ a difference-in-difference methodology with county and time fixed effects to exploit within-county variation that estimates the relationship between closure and the economic outcomes within the same county. We find that closure decreases consumer spending by two percentage points relative to January and decreases employment by around one percentage point relative to January. These results attest to the explanation that the social fear of coronavirus is causing a large portion of the economic downturns we have seen, though lockdowns themselves also have a small but meaningful impact. Moreover, we analyze heterogeneity of these impacts by partisanship and find that Republican counties were less affected (or unaffected) by lockdowns. This difference could be the result of lower enforcement of lockdowns in Republican areas, or perhaps because of decreased seriousness towards COVID-19 among individuals in Republican areas. Therefore, these results contribute to the discussion of how to promote public health measures while trying to stabilize the economy.
This video comes from a project from my undergraduate Math Modeling class! It simulates how individuals segregate themselves over time based on preferences of being around those of similar identities. This is an example of Thomas Schelling's segregation model, where two groups of people (reds and blues) move around a given area over time until they are satisfied with the makeup of their "neighborhood." The map starts with a random dispersion of reds and blues, and the result shows clusters of each color forming over time.
