Essays on Labor Economics

The first chapter studies the life-cycle behavior of two cohorts of American women: those born in the 1960s and those born in the 1980s. Millennial women are more likely to work full time, work in professional, health, and education-related occupations, and be childless in their mid-thirties than women born in the 1960s. I build a life-cycle model that incorporates labor supply, occupation, and fertility choices, and estimate the model for the older cohort. I analyze the role of two forces in explaining the data patterns: (i) labor market factors, including changes in the wage structure and in the initial joint distribution of workers\u27 skills and occupations\u27 skills requirements, and (ii) family factors, including changes in marital status across cohorts. I find that both mechanisms are important and together are able to (i) explain the changes in occupational sorting across cohorts; (ii) predict 74% of the changes in the share of women in full-time work; (iii) explain 85% of the decrease in the share of women with two children and (iv) explain 81% of the increase in the share of childless women in their mid-thirties. The second chapter, which is work performed jointly with Lucas Finamor and Boryana Ilieva, studies women and men’s labor market and insurance decisions around childbirth in Chile, a country with widespread informality. We identify three sectors of employment: formal, informal and self-employment. An individual in the informal sector works in a private firm without a labor contract and a self-employed person is an independent worker. We document the following findings. First, there are no significant changes in the share of workers with no labor contract after childbirth for both men and women, but women are more likely to switch into self-employment where the effect is larger for those highly educated. Second, we show that highly educated women are more likely to work remotely after the first birth. In contrast, low educated women do not change work location. Third, women are also more likely to switch to less cognitive intensive occupations after childbirth, which may explain the fall in wages after the event. Fourth, women are less likely to keep private health insurance after their first birth. Finally, we explore the effects of the 2008 Chilean pension system reform on formal work decisions. We observe that women who had children after 2008 are less likely to leave formal employment, in comparison to women who had children before the reform was implemented. In the third chapter, which is joint work with Paula Calvo and Zhengren Zhu, we investigate the role of maternal mental health on children\u27s cognitive and mental health development. We propose a model that incorporates maternal mental health as a separate input in the human capital production function, different from cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We employ the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, where we link mothers and their children, to document the empirical patterns that motivate this study: First, poor maternal mental health is positively associated with poor mental health of her child and negatively associated with her child\u27s cognitive development (which includes math and reading recognition). Second, poor maternal mental health is associated with worse parental practices at different ages. Third, children\u27s mental health problems affect their cognitive outcomes in school. Fourth, children with poor mental health are more likely to have mental health problems in adult life, have lower wages and lower educational attainment. Our model incorporates these key mechanisms. We describe the estimation steps and propose counterfactual exercises

Brecha de género en la educación secundaria

In Latin America, the debate on heterogeneous results in education has been centered, to a greater extent, on the differences between the wealthiest and the poorest individuals. This focus has guided policy makers. There are, however, other significant differences that receive scarce or null attention from public policies in the region, being one of these the gender gap in education. The focus of the present study is to compare males with females in three key educational outcomes: dropout rates from formal education, education lag (in schooling years) and completion of different education levels. We utilize a dataset that covers a period of 24 years (Continuous Household Survey: 1990-2013) and a dataset with youth and adolescents’ information for 2008 (National Survey of Youth and Adolescence: 2008). Both datasets are country representative. We make emphasis on adolescence (13-18 years old), a stage in which the worst educational outcomes are found in Latin America. Results show a significant gender gap, with a persistent sign through the period: male students present higher dropout rates, are left behind in schooling years and have lower rates of completion of Middle and High School. This finding is robust in different contexts of household income, home city, ethnicity, public or private educational institution and family structure. And, strikingly, the magnitude of the gender gap has remained nearly unchanged in the last two decades. This study analyzes possible explanations behind these results and provides qualitative data from teachers interviewed that belong to public and private secondary schools. The inability to diminish the gender gap and the prevalence of the lack of motivation among students to continue their studies, foster future research, and are a call for better policy designs that take into account the differences in gender

The effect of one-on-one assistance on the compliance with labor regulation. A field experiment in extremely vulnerable settings.

This is the first paper to analyze the effects of intense personal assistance on the compliance with labor regulation, within a population of deeply disadvantaged informal workers, using a field experiment. We randomly assign one-on-one assistance to these workers, and, within this treatment group, we randomly assign money to cover the cost of fulfilling the legal requirements to get a permit to work on the streets. One month after the intervention, we find that a worker who receives one-on-one assistance is three times more likely to comply with the legal documentation required by the government than a worker in the control group. We also find that a worker who receives both one-on-one assistance and cost coverage is four times more likely to comply with the legal requirements. The findings of this study shed light on strategies to help highly vulnerable workers to comply with labor regulations

Gender and high frequency vs low frequency tasks in a context of joint-liability incentives

We study the impact of high and low frequency incentives in a joint-liability framework on six academic outcomes of undergraduate students using a randomized field experiment. As recently documented in health literature, incentives to exercise are effective in developing healthy habits. Therefore, we design groups of three students and provide a premium to the homework’s grade if all the members of the group (three) meet some requirements. We investigate how the frequency of these take home tests affect the students study habits and thus, the academic outcomes. We find that there are no differences in the student’s educational outcomes between the high and low frequency groups. We also explore if male and female students respond differently to a joint-liability incentives scheme. We find that this treatment improves the accumulated grade average of male students, but not for females. This finding is in line with previous research on joint-liability and gender behavior, but now we present it in a novel context. Finally, the paper outlines the main evaluation challenges associated with a field experiment in the classroom and provide some lessons to improve evaluation designs and to foster future randomized controlled trials in this area

Brecha de género en la educación secundaria: singularidades de la mujer y el varón en las estrategias educativas.

El presente estudio se centra en comparar el comportamiento de los hombres respecto a las mujeres en tres variables claves para los logros educativos: el atraso escolar, la deserción del sistema formal y las tasas de culminación de los distintos niveles educativos. Explotamos la existencia de datos representativos de toda la población de Uruguay durante 24 años (Encuesta Continua de Hogares: 1990-2013) y datos provenientes de la Encuesta Nacional a la Juventud y Adolescencia (2008). El foco está en la adolescencia (de 13 a 18 años), que es donde se concentran los indicadores de turbulencias en materia académica en América Latina. Nuestras mediciones muestran una brecha sistemática, con un signo persistente en todo el período: los adolescentes varones presentan mayores tasas de rezago y deserción, y menores tasas de culminación del ciclo básico y bachillerato. 

Parents’ aspirations and commitment with education. Lessons from a randomized control trial in a shantytown

This paper documents the impact of an after-school program called Apoyo Escolar, sited in one of the most vulnerable neighborhoods of a developing country, Uruguay. The outcomes of interest are academic achievement, behavior at school and grade retention. By a field experiment, we explore the interaction effects of being randomly assigned to an after-school program with an indicator of parent commitment - an unaddressed question in previous literature. We found novel results that should guide policy design. Increasing time spent in safe settings does not guarantee academic success: the after-school program is effective in improving academic performance when children have committed parents. And students’ performance at school is highly correlated with parents’ educational expectations. Thus, the interaction between hope, family and after-school for disadvantaged children deserves more attention in policy design

Brecha de género en la educación secundaria

In Latin America, the debate on heterogeneous results in education has been centered, to a greater extent, on the differences between the wealthiest and the poorest individuals. This focus has guided policy makers. There are, however, other significant differences that receive scarce or null attention from public policies in the region, being one of these the gender gap in education. The focus of the present study is to compare males with females in three key educational outcomes: dropout rates from formal education, education lag (in schooling years) and completion of different education levels. We utilize a dataset that covers a period of 24 years (Continuous Household Survey: 1990-2013) and a dataset with youth and adolescents’ information for 2008 (National Survey of Youth and Adolescence: 2008). Both datasets are country representative. We make emphasis on adolescence (13-18 years old), a stage in which the worst educational outcomes are found in Latin America. Results show a significant gender gap, with a persistent sign through the period: male students present higher dropout rates, are left behind in schooling years and have lower rates of completion of Middle and High School. This finding is robust in different contexts of household income, home city, ethnicity, public or private educational institution and family structure. And, strikingly, the magnitude of the gender gap has remained nearly unchanged in the last two decades. This study analyzes possible explanations behind these results and provides qualitative data from teachers interviewed that belong to public and private secondary schools. The inability to diminish the gender gap and the prevalence of the lack of motivation among students to continue their studies, foster future research, and are a call for better policy designs that take into account the differences in gender

Frequency of testing. Lessons from a field experiment in higher education.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of frequent testing on the performance of undergraduate freshmen. Methodology The impact evaluation of the intervention is designed as a field experiment -a randomized control trial. First, instructor divided the class in groups of three students in a joint-liability framework, a setting that fosters peer monitoring among students. Then, the groups were randomly assigned to high-frequency testing (tests on a weekly schedule) or a low-frequency testing (tests on a biweekly schedule). Each testing condition lasted for 15 weeks, and data on academic achievement were collected both before and after the intervention. Findings Although high-frequency groups show a higher mean performance on academic results, the findings do not indicate a definitive improvement in performance in weekly versus biweekly testing. We related our findings with recent discoveries on students’ perception of frequent assessments and its relation to motivation. Originality A large body of educational literature investigates the effect of the frequency of testing on learning performance. Less attention has been devoted to explore the mechanisms behind that relationship. We contribute to this emerging literature analyzing the effect of test frequency on a sample of Uruguayan university students, in a novel setting (a joint-liability framework), exploring mechanisms and suggesting lessons for future research

Regular Information and Health: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Undergraduate Students

We run a randomized controlled trial with the aim of evaluating the effects of a health seminar complemented with weekly reminders on health outcomes. Our research design exploits the excess of applicants over the intervention capacity. In this 4-month intervention with undergraduate students, we provide information on preventive behaviors and healthy habits and on how to modify personal behaviors that could derive in chronical illnesses. We find that all students who were subject to the treatment improved their knowledge relative to the control group. But they were not able to translate it into healthier behaviors, neither self-reported nor objectively measured by a physician. We hypothesize that high discount rates, overconfidence and the lack of complementary inputs may explain our findings

Exploring Late Bronze Age systems of bronzework production in Switzerland through Network Science

YesMany hundreds of Bronze Age bronze artefacts are known from excavations in Switzerland, yet the interpretation of production networks from the object find locations remain problematic. It is proposed that the decorative elements used on items, such as ring-jewellery, can be used as elements to assist in the identification of artisanal traditions and ‘schools’, and also regional or community preference and selection of specific designs. Combining the analysis of over 1700 items of ring-jewellery from Switzerland with approaches from network science has facilitated the identification of regional clustering of design elements, comparable with cultural typologies in the area. It is also possible to identify potential instances of cultural differentiation through decoration within the broader regional cultural traditions. The study highlights important facets of bronzework production in the region of Switzerland, while also demonstrating future potential directions which could build upon the European wide dataset of prehistoric bronzework.Primary research conducted under previous funding at University of Basel, Switzerland – SNF gran