Sevin Kaytan

I investigate the long-term effects of after-school childcare on children's human capital investment. I exploit the timing and intensity of an after-school care reform in the Netherlands, and build a 20-year panel with administrative data to track affected cohorts from childhood through adulthood. I find that university graduation rates increased by 8%, with the strongest impact among students from less educated families. This effect stems from higher after-school care use rather than maternal employment responses, highlighting childhood environment as the key mechanism. I consider three potential channels: improved skills, stronger preferences for university, and shifting beliefs about returns to university. I find evidence supporting changes in preferences and beliefs as the main drivers, rather than skills. I show that the reform increased exposure to peers from high-SES families in after-school care, potentially driving these changes.

We investigate how information frictions affect the efficacy of contraception provision programs. We study a Costa-Rican initiative that combined two pillars: free access to long-acting-reversible contraceptives; and a tailored information campaign to raise awareness and correct for baseline misperceptions. Using administrative data and geographic variation in the initiative, we find a 16% decrease in the teen birth rate. We show information complements access: districts exposed to both pillars experience substantially larger reductions than those with contraception access alone. Using surveys on sexual behavior, we show the initiative shifted the information source from personal networks to healthcare professionals, amending misperceptions on sexual health.

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. We provide a stylized model that conceptualizes sex-work entry decisions and their implications for labor market and marriage market outcomes, then test these theoretical predictions using Dutch administrative data.

This paper investigates the labor market effects of employer-provided childcare. Using dual-sided randomized controlled trials with workers and employers, I study how childcare benefits affect worker valuations and employment decisions, as well as firm willingness to provide these benefits.

Women without children earn less than comparable men, with the gap largest during their prime child-bearing years. This paper asks whether employers penalize young women for their expected fertility, before any child arrives. Using matched employer-employee data from the Netherlands (2006 to 2013), I exploit variation across firms in the intensity of incumbent employees giving birth as a source of fertility-led productivity shocks, and examine how these shocks affect the wages of women hired in the following period. Because new hires have not yet had children, any wage adjustment reflects employer beliefs rather than realized productivity. Young women hired into recently disrupted firms earn up to 9 percent less than equally productive men. The penalty concentrates where workers are hard to replace, and holds for women who never have children.