This project currently consists of two sub-projects. In the first, I examine the labour supply response of individuals to child support, and relate that to an important labour supply elasticity used by labour and macro economists. Specifically, child support in many countries is set as a function of income, and child support liabilities end when the children involved reach emancipation age. Exploiting these two features, I estimate the intertemporal elasticity of labour supply (Frisch elasticity) in an event study design using individual-level panel data from four countries.

In the second, my co-author and I investigate the effect of seasonal unemployment on individual behavioural and other outcomes. In most economies, the unemployment rate varies across months of the year, generally for reasons unrelated to the current macroeconomic conditions and outside the control of individuals. This seasonality in the unemployment rate also varies across industries and occupations, motivating a difference-in-differences strategy. Exploiting this, we examine the effect on various behavioural outcomes, including drug use, consumption, time use, and program participation.