Working Papers
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)
Forthcoming in Economic Development and Cultural Change
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.
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)
In this paper, we study how parents react to a widely-used school policy that puts some children at a learning disadvantage. Specifically, we first document that, in line with findings in other countries, younger children in Spain perform significantly worse at school than their older peers and – key to causal interpretation – that for children born in winter this effect is not due to birth seasonality. Furthermore, the age of school entry effect is significantly greater among children from disadvantaged families. To understand why, we analyze detailed 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 at school entry, while non-college-educated parents do not.
The Effect of Working Hours on Health (PDF)
(with Jan Bietenbeck)
Does working time 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 reduction of working time across employers, which was driven by the institutional features of the reform and thus exogenous to workers' health. We find that longer working hours increase smoking and decrease self-reported health, and that these impacts are concentrated among blue-collar workers. In contrast, white-collar workers' body mass index increases with hours worked.
Motherhood and the Missing Women in the Labor Market (PDF)
(with Lucila Berniell, Dolores de la Mata, Mariana Marchionni and María Edo
Motherhood currently stands out as a key determinant of the gender gap in labor market outcomes. Studies identifying the effect of children have mostly focused in Europe and the US. These results may not be extrapolated to developing countries with different institutional settings and cultural norms. In this paper we estimate the impact of becoming a mother on various labor outcomes in Chile. Following an event-study methodology we show that motherhood implies a drastic reduction in earnings, explained by a drop in labor supply, both in the extensive and intensive margins. These changes persist even ten years after the first child is born. No child penalties are found for fathers, neither in the short nor in the long run. The results for mothers are driven by a decline in formal employment, leading to an increase in informality rates among them. Finally, we find that effects are stronger for less educated mothers, indicating that education is a buffer for this type of child penalty. Our results suggest that mothers find in the informal sector the flexibility to cope with both family and labor responsibilities, although at the cost of resigning contributory social protection and reducing on-the-job skills accumulation.
Work in Progress
First Impressions are Lasting Impressions: Campaign Advertising and Voting
Promising Minds: What Do They Do and Where Do They Go?
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
A blog post about this article in Blog del CEDLAS (Spanish)
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
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)
Forthcoming in Economic Development and Cultural Change
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.
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)
In this paper, we study how parents react to a widely-used school policy that puts some children at a learning disadvantage. Specifically, we first document that, in line with findings in other countries, younger children in Spain perform significantly worse at school than their older peers and – key to causal interpretation – that for children born in winter this effect is not due to birth seasonality. Furthermore, the age of school entry effect is significantly greater among children from disadvantaged families. To understand why, we analyze detailed 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 at school entry, while non-college-educated parents do not.
The Effect of Working Hours on Health (PDF)
(with Jan Bietenbeck)
Does working time 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 reduction of working time across employers, which was driven by the institutional features of the reform and thus exogenous to workers' health. We find that longer working hours increase smoking and decrease self-reported health, and that these impacts are concentrated among blue-collar workers. In contrast, white-collar workers' body mass index increases with hours worked.
Motherhood and the Missing Women in the Labor Market (PDF)
(with Lucila Berniell, Dolores de la Mata, Mariana Marchionni and María Edo
Motherhood currently stands out as a key determinant of the gender gap in labor market outcomes. Studies identifying the effect of children have mostly focused in Europe and the US. These results may not be extrapolated to developing countries with different institutional settings and cultural norms. In this paper we estimate the impact of becoming a mother on various labor outcomes in Chile. Following an event-study methodology we show that motherhood implies a drastic reduction in earnings, explained by a drop in labor supply, both in the extensive and intensive margins. These changes persist even ten years after the first child is born. No child penalties are found for fathers, neither in the short nor in the long run. The results for mothers are driven by a decline in formal employment, leading to an increase in informality rates among them. Finally, we find that effects are stronger for less educated mothers, indicating that education is a buffer for this type of child penalty. Our results suggest that mothers find in the informal sector the flexibility to cope with both family and labor responsibilities, although at the cost of resigning contributory social protection and reducing on-the-job skills accumulation.
Work in Progress
First Impressions are Lasting Impressions: Campaign Advertising and Voting
Promising Minds: What Do They Do and Where Do They Go?
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
A blog post about this article in Blog del CEDLAS (Spanish)
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
