CATHY BALFE

(n
ee Redmond)
www.cathybalfe.com
cathy.a.balfe@gmail.com

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

Placement Director: Andrew Chesher
Graduate Coordinator: Daniella Harper

andrew.chesher@ucl.ac.uk
economics.jobmarket@ucl.ac.uk

CONTACT DETAILS
CEMMAP
The Institute for Fiscal Studies
3rd Floor
7 Ridgmount Street
London
WC1E 7AE
United Kingdom
Phone: +44-741-1151541

EDUCATION
PhD Candidate, Economics, University College London, 2011 to present
Thesis title: Essays on Microeconometrics and the Labour Market
Expected Completion: June 2015
MRes, Economics, University College London, Distinction, 2011
MA, Financial Engineering, National University of Ireland Maynooth, First Class Honours, 2007
BA, Economics & Finance, National University of Ireland Maynooth, First Class Honours, 2006

REFERENCES
Richard Blundell (Primary Advisor)
Department of Economics
University College London
30 Gordon Street
London
WC1H 0AX
United Kingdom
r.blundell@ucl.ac.uk

Adam Rosen (Advisor)

Department of Economics
University College London
30 Gordon Street
London
WC1H 0AX
United Kingdom
adam.rosen@ucl.ac.uk

Andrew Chesher
Department of Economics
University College London
30 Gordon Street
London
WC1H 0AX
United Kingdom
andrew.chesher@ucl.ac.uk

Magne Mogstad
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago
Illinois 60637
United States
magne.mogstad@gmail.com

RESEARCH FIELDS
Applied Microeconometrics, Labour Economics, Education Economics

TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Fall 2014/2015, Econometrics for Policy, UCL, TA for Toru Kitagawa
Fall 2014/2015, Economics of Labour, UCL, TA for Donald Verry
Fall 2013/2014, An Introduction to Applied Economic Analysis, UCL, TA for Beatriz Armendariz

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
Feb 2012 - Jan 2013, Research Assistant to Adam Rosen
Oct 2008 - Oct 2010, Research Assistant, Geary Institute, University College Dublin, Ireland

CONFERENCE & SEMINAR PRESENTATION

May 2014, IZA Summer School in Labour Economics, Ammersee, Germany
Sept 2013, European Association of Labour Economists Conference, Turin, Italy
Aug 2013, European Economics Association Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden
Jun 2013, Irish Economic Association Conference, Maynooth, Ireland
Feb 2012, ENTER Jamboree, Barcelona, Spain
Apr 2010, Spring Meeting of Young Economists, Luxembourg

SCHOLARSHIPS
2010, The Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Scholarship (4 years)

PUBLICATIONS
Delaney, L., Harmon, C. & Redmond, C. (2011). Parental education, grade attainment and earnings
expectations among university students, Economics of Education Review, 30(6): 1136-1152

RESEARCH PAPERS IN PROGRESS

Maternity Leave Duration and Female-Male Relative Labour Market Outcomes
This paper analyses the impact of an expansion in paid maternity leave on relative female-male labour
market outcomes. A policy reform in the UK, which increased paid maternity leave duration by 50%
from a maximum of 26 weeks to a maximum of 39 weeks from April 2007 is used to provide exogenous
variation. A simple theoretical model is developed, which predicts an increasing female-male wage gap
in response to an increase in maternity leave duration. A quasi-experimental difference in differences
estimation approach is used to estimate the impact on the relative wage gap. Furthermore, for the
the impact of the extension on discrete outcomes (employment, hiring and redundancy), an alternative
estimation approach is proposed that has the advantage of providing interpretable treatment effects in
the presence of substitution effects. The reform was found to significantly increase the amount of leave
female employees took relative to male employees. There was an increase of about 1% in the proportion
of time female employees aged 25-34 spent on leave relative to males, with almost half of this due to a
fertility response and half due to an increase in maternity leave duration. The results also suggest that
the expansion engendered a deterioration in relative female labour market outcomes, with empirical

evidence indicating a decrease in female relative wages and an increase in relative female redundancies.
Heterogeneity, Selection and Advantage in the Graduate and Non-Graduate Labour
Market
Recent econometric developments have allowed the full distribution of causal treatment effects to be
estimated under certain conditions. This paper uses the marginal treatment effect (MTE) approach to
estimate the distribution of monetary benefits of higher education in the United Kingdom, providing
evidence for the first time on the shape of the MTE curve for females and providing additional evidence on the shape of the MTE curve for males. Significant heterogeneity in the returns from higher
education were found due to observable characteristics, with weaker evidence on heterogeneity from
unobservables. The paper also analyses whether (non) graduates have an advantage in the (non) graduate labour market, providing evidence on whether a two-skill market exists. This paper measured the
extent to which individuals select into higher education on the basis of their heterogeneous returns,
with results suggesting that in fact negative selection exists, with individuals who stand to benefit the
most from higher education not attending. This is largely explained through observed ability; highly
able individuals earn more in the non-graduate labour market, but earn similar incomes compared to
less able individuals in the graduate labour market. Since highly able individuals are more likely to
attend college, this explains why negative selection estimates were found. Highly able individuals give
up more (in the non-graduate labour market) to earn the same (in the graduate labour market).
Bounding Returns from Education: Selection into Education and the Labour Market
with Adam Rosen
This paper builds on work by Manski (1989, 1990, 1997), Manski and Pepper (2000, 2009) and Blundell,
Gosling, Ichimura & Meghir (2007) to bound the returns from different levels of education, allowing for
non-random selection into both the labour market and non-random selection into different education
levels. The literature typically focuses on only one of these selection mechanisms, whereas in this paper returns to education are estimated non-parametrically allowing for non-random selection into both
education and labour market participation simultaneously. Assumptions considered include the worst
case scenario, exogenous treatment selection (ETS), monotone treatment selection (MTS), monotone
treatment response (MTR) and monotone instrumental variables (MIV). The resulting bound or point
estimators are estimated empirically using data from UK National Child Development Study.