I investigate the long-term effects of after-school childcare on children’s human capital investment. I exploit a 2007 Dutch reform that expanded childcare subsidies to increase maternal employment. Using administrative data, I track impacted cohorts from childhood through young adulthood. I show that while the reform failed to achieve its intended maternal employment effects, it generated substantial benefits by moving children from home-based care to structured care settings with peers. Increased access to after-school care raised university graduation rates, particularly for girls from low-educated families. Merging administrative records with surveys, I find suggestive evidence that this impact results from changing beliefs and preferences rather than improving cognitive skills. After-school care expands interactions with peers from high-income and well-educated families, changing aspirations and norms around mothers using childcare to pursue employment – thereby increasing returns to human capital.

This paper investigates how information frictions affect the efficacy of contraception provision programs. We study a Costa-Rican initiative that aimed at reducing teenage pregnancies. The program combined free access to long-acting reversible contraceptives, eliciting baseline misperceptions about sexual health, and a tailored information campaign to correct for them. Exploiting the geographic variation in the initiative combined with administrative birth data, we find a 16% decrease in teen birth-rate. Using survey data on sexual behavior and beliefs, we show the policy changed the source of information from personal networks to healthcare professionals, which amends misinformation on sexual health and contraception use. The reduction in teen-birth is stronger in conservative districts, where restrictive social norms can explain teenagers’ lower knowledge about sexual health, contributing to risky behaviors.

This paper examines whether young women who previously worked as sex workers face long-term penalties in the labor and marriage markets due to social stigma associated with prostitution by providing a stylized model that conceptualizes sex-work entry decisions and their implications for labor market and marriage market outcomes, then testing these theoretical predictions using Dutch administrative data.

This paper suggests a new channel for the gender pay gap - an expected fertility penalty for young women in prime-childbearing ages - by using a quasi-experimental approach that exploits variation in the share of coworkers who gave birth in the year prior to hiring and examines effects on initial wage offers for women hired, finding that non-mother women in prime childbearing years receive lower wage offers when joining firms where more coworkers recently gave birth, with the expected fertility penalty being larger in small firms where workplace productivity losses from births are more salient, demonstrating that women face wage penalties not only for actual childbearing but for fertility expectations based on recent workplace experiences with maternity leave.