Md Moshi Ul Alam

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Hi!😊 I am a labor economist. My research interests are in answering microeconomic questions on economic inequality in Labor and Public Economics. Depending on the question, I use either design-based, or model-based methods, or both. I received my PhD in Economics, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Working papers

• Employee-Side Discrimination: Beliefs and Preferences (PhD JMP)

  with Mehreen Mookerjee and Sanket Roy [+Abstract]

  R&R at Quantitative Economics

• Labor Market Consequences of Pay-Equity Laws (Post-doc JMP)

  with Steven Lehrer and Nuno Souso Pereira [+Abstract]

  Updated Mar ’25 [Under review]

• The Unintended Benefits of Women’s Empowerment on Household Sanitation

  with Monica Agarwal [+Abstract] [ SSRN]

  Updated April ’25 [Under review]

• Location Choice and the Marginal Utility of Consumption

  with Morris Davis and Jesse Gregory

  Draft coming soon!

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Publications/Accepted

• “Increases in shared custody after divorce in the United States.”

  with Daniel Meyer and Marcia Carlson. [+Abstract] [ Replication]

  Demographic Research 46 (2022): 1137-1162. “Editor’s Choice” article

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Research in progress

• Spatial Inequality and School Choice Mechanisms

  with Monica Agarwal, Chao Fu, YingHua He

• Labor Market Inequality and Collective Bargaining

  with Steven Lehrer and Nuno Souso Pereira

• Racial Gaps in Wage Growth: Discrimination, Selection and Search Frictions

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Dormant papers

• Identification in Models of Discrimination

  [subsumed in my PhD job market paper “Employee Side Discrimination: Beliefs and Preferences”]

micro = require("micromodal@0.4.10");

micro.init({
  awaitOpenAnimation: true,
  awaitCloseAnimation: true
});

Increases in shared custody after divorce in the United States

This paper provides new evidence on the time trend in shared physical custody after divorce in the U.S., using eight waves of data from the Current Population Survey - Child Support Supplement. We find that the likelihood of shared custody more than doubled between divorces that occurred before 1985 and those in 2010-2014, from 12% to 28%. We show that non-Hispanic Whites and those who are more socioeconomically advantaged are more likely to have shared custody. Using more formal methods we show that the increase cannot be explained by changes in the characteristics of those divorcing; instead, we infer that this is the result of changing norms and policies that favor shared custody. Finally, this paper complements previous analyses using court record data from Wisconsin and shows that while the rate of shared custody in Wisconsin is higher than the national rate, a large increase over time has occurred in the nation as well as in Wisconsin. These changing patterns have important implications for children’s living arrangements and for the parental investments that children receive after their parents’ divorce.