Maria Frech
I am a PhD candidate at Toulouse School of Economics, supervised by Christian Hellwig.
I am a quantitative macroeconomist with research interests in wealth inequality, household finance and entrepreneurship.
You can find my CV here.
Don't hesitate to reach out at maria.frech@tse-fr.eu
Working Papers
Uniform Contracts and Unequal Flexibility Needs - A Theory of Gendered Employment Dynamics (with Gerard Maideu-Morera)
Abstract: Persistent gender disparities in wages and employment remain despite formally equal labor markets. Empirical evidence highlights women’s greater need for flexible working hours as a central explanation. We propose a theory in which the interaction of uniform work arrangements and stochastic, unverifiable shocks to time availability endogenously generates gendered labor market dynamics. We develop a dynamic contracting model between an employer and an employee in which men and women differ only in their probability of low time availability, disciplined using the American Time Use Survey. When contracts are tailored to workers’ flexibility needs, flexibility shocks generate individual wage fluctuations but no systematic gender differences over the life cycle. When the employer has to offer a uniform contract to both genders, the model endogenously gives rise to well-documented gendered labor market outcomes: (i) the divergence and non-convergence of gender earnings differentials over the life cycle, and (ii) women’s shorter job duration and weaker labor-force attachment. The model highlights a tension between formal equality and how work contracts can insure women against flexibility needs.
Unicredit Award 2025 - best paper on gender economics
Is Knowledge Enough? Financial Literacy, Marriage, and Gender Differences in Wealth(with Marta Cota, Marta Morazzoni and Michael Tallent)
Abstract: This paper studies whether financial literacy shapes gender differences in wealth. Using data from the United States and the Netherlands, we document that women have lower financial literacy and confidence than men, are less likely to manage long-term investments within their households, and hold fewer financial assets, with the largest gaps among married agents. We build a life-cycle portfolio-choice model with endogenous financial literacy accumulation and marital dynamics centered around two wedges: a higher cost of literacy investment for married women and gender-specific perceived returns on risky assets. The calibrated model qualitatively matches untargeted life-cycle patterns in literacy and portfolio choice, accounting for a third of the gender gap in individual financial assets. Counterfactual exercises show that early-life financial education can narrow the gender knowledge gap, and portfolio-allocation rules may offset confidence and marriage-related wedges that education may not undo, lowering the wealth gap by 6\%.
Work in Progress
Abstract: Quantitative models of wealth inequality share a common logic: small differences in endowments or returns compound over the life cycle into large gaps in wealth, building inequality up as a cohort ages. I challenge this implicit assumption with a novel empirical observation: Income inequality rises steeply from labor-market entry, but wealth inequality is already at its highest point in early adulthood and remains flat thereafter. This profile offers a new test for models built to match the cross-section, and a new way to ask where wealth inequality comes from. I argue that the initial distribution of income and wealth shapes the profile more than the accumulation that follows. I develop a framework to read a life-cycle inequality profile as a cohort's transition from its entry distribution toward the stationary cross-section of the corresponding infinite-horizon economy. Its shape identifies where a cohort enters relative to its long-run dispersion, and shows that entry dispersion survives across much of working life. I test standard mechanisms for their power to explain the observed profile, but the early flatness seems to be the mark of initial conditions.
Entrepreneurship and Self-employment: Consequences of Life-cycle Timing