This paper aims to investigate the importance of information campaigns in policies providing free access to contraceptives. Focusing on a policy change in Costa-Rica that introduced long-active reversible contraceptives (LARCs), we explore the effects of both access and information campaigns on the teen birth rate. Utilizing a differences-in-differences methodology, we show a reduction of over 21% in the teen birth rate during the first three years of the policy. To disentangle the role of information campaigns from the contraceptive provision, we leverage the number of years each cohort spent in school as the campaigns were primarily delivered within schools. We show that access to LARCs reduces the teen birth rate by 18%, whereas exposure to information campaigns amplifies the impact of access by roughly 4% more per year of exposure.

This paper aims to identify whether prostitution is seen as an income-smoothing opportunity for young women and the long- term effects of such a decision on their labor market outcomes. We aim to measure the take- up of sex-work employment following income shocks and evaluate the effects of working as a prostitute on these workers’ overall labor supply, fertility decisions, and earnings trajectory.

This paper suggests a new channel for the gender pay gap - an expected fertility penalty for young women in prime-childbearing ages. I employ event studies around the birth of the first child to evaluate the residual wage gap. My results show that the residual gap widens through the life cycle of women, and fertility changes how women are perceived in the labor market. Later, I employ a quasi-experimental approach to analyze the effects of coworkers giving birth on non-mother females. I find that non-mother women in prime-childbearing ages are perceived as less productive from the employer’s perspective after a coworker giving birth in the previous period. In other words, there’s not just a penalty for child-bearing, but for the expectation of fertility as well. Furthermore, salience matters - in small firms, the expected fertility penalty is larger the bigger the productivity loss (number of employees giving birth) experienced in the workplace.