Jacob Hazen

I study how the parent-child relationship shapes the development of children’s socio-emotional skills. I develop and estimate a dynamic model of household decision-making in which parents allocate time across work, leisure, and active time with the child, and choose how much to spend on the child. These choices build a parent-child bond, which captures emotional warmth and consistency. Investment affects skills mainly through the bond: it builds the bond, which in turn builds skills, while its direct effect on skills is small. I also find that mothers’ active time is the most productive input into investment, followed by fathers’ active time and then expenditures on the child. Counterfactual analysis shows that policies raising family income have little effect on parental investment, although they raise the bond more than they raise skills. Policies that could change how parents value the child’s skills or the relationship, or that directly strengthen the bond, such as school-based or family therapy programs, are more effective at raising socio-emotional skills. These findings place the parent-child bond, rather than investment itself, at the centre of the technology of socio-emotional skill formation.

This study examines the process of how socio-emotional skills in children evolve and how they predict adult outcomes. Using Canadian data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), this research estimates production functions of socio-emotional skills. Using recent advances in Latent Factor Analysis, I find a five factor model representation of socio-emotional skills, attention, conduct, prosocial, emotional, and malice problems. I find that these skills are shown to be increasingly self-productive as child ages and that parental investment are larger for these skills at earlier ages. Next, using income data from their tax files in adulthood, I show that children that have higher levels of malice problems suggest a 4% increase in earnings.

In this paper, we analyze persistent inequality in maternal mental health by examining whether and how mothers’ latent mental health can be compared across different stages of motherhood for different groups. We introduce a measurement model for binary mental health indicators that draws on multiple measures across survey rounds, establishing identification conditions for valid cross-group and longitudinal comparisons. We implement this framework using rich longitudinal data from Peru (Young Lives Study), covering mothers’ mental health over a fifteen-year period and study inequality in mental health across Indigenous and non-Indigenous mothers. We find that mental health measures exhibit strict measurement invariance, enabling direct comparisons across groups and over time. Our results reveal that while both Indigenous and non-Indigenous mothers experience improvements in mental health after the postpartum period, the gains are substantially larger for non-Indigenous mothers, leading to widening disparities as children age. We show that differences in educational attainment and family composition explain most of the initial gap in mental health, but early postpartum mental health becomes increasingly important in driving persistent inequality through children’s adolescence.

The post-pandemic labour market has been tight, with widespread labour shortages across sectors and industries. Employers have a range of strategies for attracting and retaining workers in a more-competitive labour market, including raising wages, offering more benefits and lowering skill, education and experience requirements. This project used Canadian job ads to understand changes in the terms of employment offered to job seekers, focusing specifically on skill, education, and experience requirements, as well as job benefits, between the two-year period prior to the pandemic (2017-2019) and 2022. The project found that there had been no increase in wages in the five-year period, but that wages were more likely to be posted in job ads in 2022 than in the period prior to the pandemic. An increasing proportion of job ads included skill requirements, especially soft skills, and more included education and experience requirements. But the educational and experience requirements have become less demanding, requiring less education and fewer years of experience. The research also found that an increasing proportion of job postings include non-wage benefits, compensation-linked benefits for lower-wage jobs, and flexibility and time off benefits for higher-wage jobs. The findings from this project suggest that employers are increasingly competing for low-wage workers and that the primary method being used to attract talent is improving benefits. This bodes well for the quality of work for those in low-wage positions, but questions remain about the ability of employers to offer higher wages for these in-demand roles.