This project investigates the societal impacts of childcare policies, with a focus on their potential to shape long-term outcomes and behavioral patterns. Leveraging comprehensive administrative data, I examine how subsidized childcare may influence educational and economic trajectories over time
This paper aims to identify whether young women who worked as sex-workers in the past suffer from long-term penalty in labor market and marriage market due to the social stigma associated with prostitution. According to Verhoven (2017), sex workers often define themselves as entrepreneurs and their work choice as a possibility to improve their lives financially. To them, this type of work often carries a temporal aspect that’s preferred to overcome the financial hardships they face. Building on this motivation, we aim to study the long-term impacts of entry to sex work on relationships and careers of sex workers.
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 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.