Previous studies report a range of estimates for the response of female labor supply and childcare attendance to childcare prices. We shed new light on these questions using a policy reform that raises the price of public day care. After the reform, children are 8 percentage points less likely to attend public day care, which implies a compensated price elasticity of −0.6. There is little labor supply response in the full sample, although there are declines for vulnerable subgroups. Spillover effects on older siblings and fertility decisions show that the policy affects the whole household, not just targeted family members.

This article studies how portable skills accumulated in the labor market are. Using rich data on tasks performed in occupations, we propose the concept of task‐specific human capital to measure empirically the transferability of skills across occupations. Our results on occupational mobility and wages show that labor market skills are more portable than previously considered. We find that individuals move to occupations with similar task requirements and that the distance of moves declines with experience. We also show that task‐specific human capital is an important source of individual wage growth, accounting for up to 52% of overall wage growth.

Using administrative labor market data matched to mortality statistics and patient records, we document that negative labor market shocks produce sizable health spillovers in couples. For every 100,000 displaced men, there are 1,100 additional deaths. Of those, 60% accrue to the displaced worker, but 40% are due to excess spousal mortality. We find a stunning gender asymmetry: while male job displacement generates persistent negative health effects, no such dire consequences are observed after a woman’s job loss. We explore several explanations for these patterns: risk sharing through spousal labor supply; earnings losses and public insurance; widowhood; regional mobility and gender roles in the family.