Working Papers
Pay Cycles: Individual and Aggregate Effects of Paycheck Frequency (PDF)
A blog post about this article in Nada es Gratis (Spanish).
This paper shows that the frequency at which workers are paid affects the within-month patterns of both household expenditure and aggregate economic activity. To identify causal effects, I exploit two novel sources of exogenous variation in pay frequency in the US. First, using an as-good-as-random variation in the pay frequency of retired couples, I show that those who are paid more frequently have smoother expenditure paths. Second, I take advantage of cross-state variation in labor laws to compare patterns of economic activity in states in which the frequency with which wages are paid differs. I document that low pay frequencies lead to within-month business cycles when many workers are paid on the same dates, which in turn generates costly congestion in sectors with capacity constraints. These findings have important policy implications for contexts where firms and workers do not internalize such congestion externalities as this situation leads to market equilibria with suboptimally low pay frequencies and few paydays.
Poor Little Children: The Socioeconomic Gap in Parental Responses to School Disadvantages (PDF)
(with Ricardo Estrada)
We use detailed data on parental investment to study how parents react to a widely used school policy that puts some children at a learning disadvantage. A strict school-entry cutoff law in Spain generates a large exogenous variation in the age at which children start school. We first document that younger children perform significantly worse at school than their older peers –in line with findings in other countries. We use data from the universe of newborns in Spain to document that for the children born in winter this effect is not due to seasonality in birth patterns. Then, we show that this age of school entry effect is significantly greater among children from disadvantaged families. We analyze data on parental investment and find that college educated parents increase their time investment and choose schools with better inputs when their children are the youngest in their classroom, while non-college educated parents do not.
The Impact of a Permanent Income Shock on the Situation of Women in the Household: the Case of a Pension Reform in Argentina
PDF (with Dolores de la Mata and Matilde Machado).
Blog and Press about this article in Vox Lacea (English) and in Bastión Digital (Spanish)
Status: Revise and Resubmit
Income transfers from social programs are often not gender neutral and should, according to the vast literature on intra-household decision making and allocation, affect the distribution of bargaining power within the household. This result, however, was by and large established under the assumption of marriage stability. If this assumption does not hold, then the positive response of bargaining power to income found in the empirical research may be the artefact of sample selection. One may postulate, however, that when restricted to certain groups in the population, such as seniors, the assumption may hold since their probability of divorce is close to zero. In this paper we prove that the assumption is wrong, even when applied to seniors. We use a non-contributory pension reform in Argentina, that resulted in an unexpected and substantial increase in permanent income for around 1.8 million women, to study its effects on outcomes related to both marital stability and women’s bargaining power within the household. We find that the reform increased the probability of divorce/separation among senior highly educated women but had no impact on the low-educated. Instead, the latter gained considerable bargaining power within the household by decreasing the probability of being the only one in charge of household chores in tandem with an increase in their husbands’ participation in these chores.
The Effect of Working Hours on Health (PDF)
(with Jan Bietenbeck).
Status: Under Review
Does working time causally affect workers' health? We study this question in the context of a French reform which reduced the standard workweek from 39 to 35 hours, at constant earnings. Our empirical analysis exploits variation in the adoption of this shorter workweek across employers which is mainly driven by institutional features of the reform and thus exogenous to workers' health. Difference-in-differences and lagged dependent variable regressions reveal a negative effect of working hours on self-reported health and positive effects on smoking and body mass index, though the latter is imprecisely estimated. Results are robust to accounting for endogenous job mobility and differ by workers' occupations.
Work in Progress
First Impressions are Lasting Impressions: Campaign Advertising and Voting
This paper analyzes the effects of political advertising using detailed data on voting records and campaign advertising in the Buenos Aires mayoral election of 2015. To identify causal effects I take advantage of a unique situation in which, on the basis of a lottery, parties' billboards were randomly located on different areas of the city before two consecutive elections, and the same set of candidates competed for the same position. I exploit random variation in the number of billboards allocated to the various parties near each polling station and find that political advertising had a significant positive impact on candidates’ share of votes in the first election with persisting effects in the following one. The lasting effects of the first campaign significantly reduced the effectiveness of successive advertising campaigns.
Promising Minds: What Do They Do and Where Do They Go?
A nation’s brightest minds are key for innovation and growth: they not only adapt more easily to the most recent technologies, but they can also foster the development of new ones. This paper analyzes the occupational and location choices of a set of very talented individuals: those who while at high school represented their countries in the world championship mathematics competition for pre-college students (International Mathematical Olympiad, IMO). I tracked the career and migration paths of gold and silver medal winners in the IMO - around 80 medalists yearly- between 1990 and 1994. The database developed contains information about the occupational and location choices of 70% of the individuals in question for up to 20 years after graduating from high school, thus allowing me to compare the paths followed by gifted individuals born in different countries who were equally highly talented at high school. The analysis shows that the majority of these individuals followed very similar occupational choices and took similar location decisions: 60% completed their PhD in the US, UK or France - in STEM fields-, and 53% of them were working in these three countries in 2016. This represents a large brain gain to these countries, considering that only 15% of the medalists were living in the US, UK or France at the moment of the competition. The biggest winner has been the US: only 1/20 of the 90-94 cohorts of IMO’s medalists were US participants, but nowadays one-third of that cohort of mathematically gifted individuals is working in the US, in academia, tech companies or in the financial sector.
The Production Function of College Education: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
(with Manuel Bagues and Antonio Cabrales)
Policy Work
Time Use and Skills Development in Latin American Households
(with Lian Allub)
Prepared for the Inter-American Development Bank Research Network 2015: Private Spending on Skills Development in Latin America
Overview of Time Use Data Used for the Analysis of Gender Differences in Time Use Patterns
(with Carolina Sánchez-Páramo)
Background paper for the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development, The World Bank
Pay Cycles: Individual and Aggregate Effects of Paycheck Frequency (PDF)
A blog post about this article in Nada es Gratis (Spanish).
This paper shows that the frequency at which workers are paid affects the within-month patterns of both household expenditure and aggregate economic activity. To identify causal effects, I exploit two novel sources of exogenous variation in pay frequency in the US. First, using an as-good-as-random variation in the pay frequency of retired couples, I show that those who are paid more frequently have smoother expenditure paths. Second, I take advantage of cross-state variation in labor laws to compare patterns of economic activity in states in which the frequency with which wages are paid differs. I document that low pay frequencies lead to within-month business cycles when many workers are paid on the same dates, which in turn generates costly congestion in sectors with capacity constraints. These findings have important policy implications for contexts where firms and workers do not internalize such congestion externalities as this situation leads to market equilibria with suboptimally low pay frequencies and few paydays.
Poor Little Children: The Socioeconomic Gap in Parental Responses to School Disadvantages (PDF)
(with Ricardo Estrada)
We use detailed data on parental investment to study how parents react to a widely used school policy that puts some children at a learning disadvantage. A strict school-entry cutoff law in Spain generates a large exogenous variation in the age at which children start school. We first document that younger children perform significantly worse at school than their older peers –in line with findings in other countries. We use data from the universe of newborns in Spain to document that for the children born in winter this effect is not due to seasonality in birth patterns. Then, we show that this age of school entry effect is significantly greater among children from disadvantaged families. We analyze data on parental investment and find that college educated parents increase their time investment and choose schools with better inputs when their children are the youngest in their classroom, while non-college educated parents do not.
The Impact of a Permanent Income Shock on the Situation of Women in the Household: the Case of a Pension Reform in Argentina
PDF (with Dolores de la Mata and Matilde Machado).
Blog and Press about this article in Vox Lacea (English) and in Bastión Digital (Spanish)
Status: Revise and Resubmit
Income transfers from social programs are often not gender neutral and should, according to the vast literature on intra-household decision making and allocation, affect the distribution of bargaining power within the household. This result, however, was by and large established under the assumption of marriage stability. If this assumption does not hold, then the positive response of bargaining power to income found in the empirical research may be the artefact of sample selection. One may postulate, however, that when restricted to certain groups in the population, such as seniors, the assumption may hold since their probability of divorce is close to zero. In this paper we prove that the assumption is wrong, even when applied to seniors. We use a non-contributory pension reform in Argentina, that resulted in an unexpected and substantial increase in permanent income for around 1.8 million women, to study its effects on outcomes related to both marital stability and women’s bargaining power within the household. We find that the reform increased the probability of divorce/separation among senior highly educated women but had no impact on the low-educated. Instead, the latter gained considerable bargaining power within the household by decreasing the probability of being the only one in charge of household chores in tandem with an increase in their husbands’ participation in these chores.
The Effect of Working Hours on Health (PDF)
(with Jan Bietenbeck).
Status: Under Review
Does working time causally affect workers' health? We study this question in the context of a French reform which reduced the standard workweek from 39 to 35 hours, at constant earnings. Our empirical analysis exploits variation in the adoption of this shorter workweek across employers which is mainly driven by institutional features of the reform and thus exogenous to workers' health. Difference-in-differences and lagged dependent variable regressions reveal a negative effect of working hours on self-reported health and positive effects on smoking and body mass index, though the latter is imprecisely estimated. Results are robust to accounting for endogenous job mobility and differ by workers' occupations.
Work in Progress
First Impressions are Lasting Impressions: Campaign Advertising and Voting
This paper analyzes the effects of political advertising using detailed data on voting records and campaign advertising in the Buenos Aires mayoral election of 2015. To identify causal effects I take advantage of a unique situation in which, on the basis of a lottery, parties' billboards were randomly located on different areas of the city before two consecutive elections, and the same set of candidates competed for the same position. I exploit random variation in the number of billboards allocated to the various parties near each polling station and find that political advertising had a significant positive impact on candidates’ share of votes in the first election with persisting effects in the following one. The lasting effects of the first campaign significantly reduced the effectiveness of successive advertising campaigns.
Promising Minds: What Do They Do and Where Do They Go?
A nation’s brightest minds are key for innovation and growth: they not only adapt more easily to the most recent technologies, but they can also foster the development of new ones. This paper analyzes the occupational and location choices of a set of very talented individuals: those who while at high school represented their countries in the world championship mathematics competition for pre-college students (International Mathematical Olympiad, IMO). I tracked the career and migration paths of gold and silver medal winners in the IMO - around 80 medalists yearly- between 1990 and 1994. The database developed contains information about the occupational and location choices of 70% of the individuals in question for up to 20 years after graduating from high school, thus allowing me to compare the paths followed by gifted individuals born in different countries who were equally highly talented at high school. The analysis shows that the majority of these individuals followed very similar occupational choices and took similar location decisions: 60% completed their PhD in the US, UK or France - in STEM fields-, and 53% of them were working in these three countries in 2016. This represents a large brain gain to these countries, considering that only 15% of the medalists were living in the US, UK or France at the moment of the competition. The biggest winner has been the US: only 1/20 of the 90-94 cohorts of IMO’s medalists were US participants, but nowadays one-third of that cohort of mathematically gifted individuals is working in the US, in academia, tech companies or in the financial sector.
The Production Function of College Education: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
(with Manuel Bagues and Antonio Cabrales)
Policy Work
Time Use and Skills Development in Latin American Households
(with Lian Allub)
Prepared for the Inter-American Development Bank Research Network 2015: Private Spending on Skills Development in Latin America
Overview of Time Use Data Used for the Analysis of Gender Differences in Time Use Patterns
(with Carolina Sánchez-Páramo)
Background paper for the World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development, The World Bank
