Esther works on labor economics, especially child labor. She is interested in how poor households cope with unemployment, debt, illness, and other events that threaten income and consumption. Her most recent work is a paper entitled “Wage Payment Reform: Its Effect on Labor Supply and Welfare” presented to the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University and to the Society of Labor Economists and the Cliometric Society and has been published in the Journal of Economic History (December 2012). Esther’s two-volume set on the economics of the family was published in January 2015.