I investigate the long-term effects of after-school childcare on children's human capital investment. I study a 2007 Dutch reform that expanded childcare subsidies in order to increase maternal employment, and I track impacted cohorts from childhood through young adulthood using administrative data. Exploiting cohort exposure and subsidy changes, I show that while maternal employment didn't budge, after-school care use increased, raising children's university graduation rates by 20%. I find that this impact results from changing beliefs and preferences rather than cognitive skills, as math scores remain unchanged. The impact is strongest among students facing the highest university access costs, particularly girls from low-educated families. Survey data explains why - the reform normalized mothers using childcare to work, increasing expected returns from university for girls. I show that the reform expanded interactions with peers from high-income and well-educated families in after-school care, potentially driving these changes.
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 - 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.