Scott Kim | Research

Publications

This paper investigates how children affect women in science, using biographies in the American Men of Science (MoS 1956), linked with publications. First, we show that mothers have a unique lifecycle pattern of productivity: While other scientists peak in their mid-30s, mothers become less productive at that age and reach peak productivity in their early-40s. To investigate the causal effects of children on productivity, we estimate event studies of marriage, comparing mothers and fathers with other married scientists. Event study estimates show that the productivity of mothers declines until children reach school age, while there is no effect on fathers. These differences have important implications for tenure and participation: Just 27% of mothers achieve tenure, compared with 48% of fathers and 46% of other women. When women carried the full burden of childcare, the time costs of raising the baby boom led to a great loss of female scientists.

In recent years, a surge in broad-based inflationary pressures has shaped the economic landscape. Rising housing costs, particularly rents, have emerged as a prominent driver of the increased cost of living for many households. Against this backdrop, key questions arise: How do renters adjust when their rent goes up? What gets cut? And who is affected most? While the role of rent inflation in the broader economy is well known, the precise ways in which rent increases reshape renters' financial lives remain underexplored. This report provides new evidence on how renters absorb increases and traces the subsequent adjustments in non-housing consumption in response to growing housing costs. Overall, we find that rising rents can add significant financial strain for renters, particularly those spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent.

This paper examines how citizens weigh the benefits and costs of land registration in shaping their voting behavior. While land registration can improve public goods provision and enable property-based lending, it can also facilitate taxation and potential targeting by state authorities. Using novel spatial data from a World Bank policy that incentivized Nigerian states to register urban properties, I investigate how this tradeoff affects political support for incumbent parties. To do so, I leverage variation in registration and incumbent vote share differences within neighboring polling units. Baseline results show that registered communities reduced their support for incumbent parties by 3.8 percentage points in the subsequent governorship election. Heterogeneity splits show that this political cost is significantly larger in areas lacking public infrastructure: the incumbent vote share penalty ranges from 4.2 to 8.8 percentage points in communities without sewage systems, piped water, and poor road quality.