I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Amsterdam. I am interested in empirical microeconomics, with a focus on labor, family economics, and applied microeconometrics. My advisors are Erik Plug and Bas van der Klaauw.
I am on the 2024/2025 academic job market.
You can reach me at j.ilciukas@uva.nl or on X.
Job Market Paper
Parenthood Timing and Gender Inequality
I study how parenthood affects women’s labor market outcomes and gender inequality. I introduce a method to quantify the impacts that simultaneously addresses selective parenthood timing and parenthood timing-dependent effects. The method leverages quasi-experimental variation in the success of assisted conception procedures throughout women’s entire treatment histories. Using administrative Dutch data, I find that parenthood persistently reduces women’s work hours and income by 9 to 24 percent. Despite that, I find that at least half of the observed post-child gender inequality in these outcomes is not caused by parenthood. Additionally, I propose a unified framework to disentangle and quantify how selective timing and timing-dependent effects bias conventional estimators, successfully reconciling key conflicting findings in the literature. My method is applicable to other settings where individuals are quasi-experimentally assigned to one state but may enter others either through direct selection or by opting into quasi-experimental reassignment.
Publications
Fertility and Parental Retirement. Journal of Public Economics. 2023.
I study how reduced retirement opportunities in one generation affect fertility in the subsequent generation. I use administrative Dutch data and exploit the 2006 Dutch pension reform, which induced individuals born from January 1, 1950 onward to delay retirement while exempting those born earlier. I find that this reform reduced fertility among women with affected mothers. The reduction is economically significant and persists after the impact on retirement fades out. I supplement my analysis with survey evidence and argue that the fertility reduction can be explained by reduced grandparental child care supply.
Work in Progress
The Only Child (with Petter Lundborg, Erik Plug, and Astrid Rasmussen).
We estimate the impact of having siblings on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes of first-born children, using quasi-experimental variation in the success of in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures. We introduce an improved instrumental variable (IV) approach that addresses concerns about birth spacing and apply it to data from nationwide Danish school surveys matched to administrative registers. We find that siblings have little effect on test scores in math and reading, personality traits such as agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, or overall well-being. Our results suggest that the strong negative correlation between being an only child and these outcomes is driven by family selection rather than the causal effect of siblings.