This session focuses on labor supply, employment, and wages. In her paper, Samantha Schenck investigates "The effect of state paid family leave policies on the inequalities in maternity leave usage in the US." Past research has shown that mothers from disadvantaged groups, such as those from low-income households, minorities, and single mothers take less maternity leave because they are less likely to have access to paid leave through their employers and they have little ability to afford unpaid leave. Preliminary results show that California's new near-universal paid family leave program reduced the leave inequality experienced by single mothers, but has done little to reduce the leave gap experienced by low-income mothers. In "Are close-knit communities good for employment?," Maria Paz Espinosa analyzes the role of close-knittedness in labor market networks. Since friends and acquaintances are sources of employment information, the number of connections an individual has, as well as the way they are structured, may affect the information about vacancies that is received. People in close-knitted neighborhoods are more likely to be unemployed and earn lower income. However, the latter effect is driven by worse employment prospects; conditional on being employed through contacts, people in denser neighborhoods earn higher expected wages. In "Shirking between games: An analysis of game-by-game major league baseball player data," Richard Paulsen seeks to identify whether one avenue through which players in the early years of multi-year contracts shirk is in the exertion of effort between games. The author finds that increases in contract length lead to diminished performance when a player is playing on short rest, but not when a player has longer rest. This study indicates that this diminished performance is driven by games played on short rest in cities with the best night-life in the United States. In "The determination of minimum wage: Are minimum wages exogenous?," Chong-Uk Kim finds that states with a Democratic governor and more Democratic assembly members have higher minimum wages than do states with a Republican governor and fewer Democratic assembly members. Thus, the model provides evidence that minimum wages in the U.S. might be based more on political factors than on economic ones; this result is troubling given the possibility of distortions in the labor market resulting from the wrong level of minimum wages.