Increasing mother’s labor supply during a child’s preschool years may reduce time investments, yielding a negative direct effect on midchildhood and teenage outcomes. But as mother’s work hours increase, income will rise. Can income compensate for the negative effect of hours? Our mediation analysis exploits exogenous variation in both mother’s hours and family income. Results suggest a negative, insignificant direct effect from increasing mother’s hours on child test scores. However, the positive mediating effect of income creates a positive total effect on test scores (26% of a standard deviation) for a 10-hour increase in mother’s weekly hours in preschool years.

We study the migration behavior of displaced workers and find that job displacement increases regional mobility. We find, however, that noneconomic factors, such as family ties, are very important for the migration decision and that there is strong heterogeneity in outcomes. We find large income losses for workers who move to regions where they have family or to rural areas, while, for example, rural to urban movers realize a significant long-term earnings increase. We also find that life events related to fertility, divorce, and new relationships correlate with mobility after job loss and may partly explain the large income losses.