Three essays in Empirical Public Economics

In this dissertation, I study the role of policies and institutions to foster social inclusion. In particular, in two of my projects, I use the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) dataset to analyze the impact of institutions and policies on individuals' decisions. In the fi rst Chapter, I exploit the historical context and study how the Soviet regime changed women's choices within the Soviet sphere regarding educational attainment, labor participation, marriage and fertility. In the second chapter, I consider the role of employment status and the probability to provide informal care to elders in Europe. Finally, in the third part of my doctoral dissertation, I study the role of self-regulation to mitigate the ethnic discrimination on the largest hospitality platform, Airbnb. The firt rst Chapter, "USSR, Education, Work History, Fertility Choices, and Later-Life Outcomes" (with Telmo P erez-Izquierdo), investigates the diference in the impact of the Soviet regime on life decisions within the Soviet sphere. We use the retrospective SHARELIFE data to analyze the educational, labor, marriage, and fertility decisions of East Europeans from 1950 to 1990. The main identi cation strategy is a natural experiment in which we compare former provinces of the Russian Empire in Lithuania and Poland that were exposed to different forms of communism after WWII. For 40 years, Lithuania was a part of the USSR, whereas Poland was a part of the Eastern Bloc. We find that during communism, Lithuanian women worked two years more by age 50 relative to Polish women. This effect is half of the one found for the East-West Germany comparison. Moreover, we observe that women's educational attainment increased more than men's. We propose a potential mechanism behind this fact: an indirect channel of improved work opportunities on female education. Accordingly, this paper's fi ndings highlight the different impacts of the Soviet regime within communist countries. The second Chapter, "Impact of Employment on Informal Caregiving to the Elderly Mothers in Europe", studies the trade-off faced by adult individuals in Europe between participating in the labor market and providing informal care to their elderly mothers. Using the SHARE data, I develop a bivariate simultaneous choice model of work and informal care. To correct for the endogeneity of employment status in care decision, I exploit the heterogeneous impact of the Great Recession on European countries as an exclusion restriction in a non-linear setting. When individuals between 50 and below statutory retirement age participate in the labor market, the probability of providing informal care to elder mothers decreases by about nine percentage points. This nding documents the negative causal relationship between employment and the provision of informal care in Europe. The third Chapter, "Online Discrimination and (Self ) Regulation: Evaluating the Airbnb's Nondiscrimination Policy" (with Michelangelo Rossi), is motivated by the following fact digital platforms have changed the ways of doing business in many markets. Still, some characteristics of the transactions occurring online remain unaltered relative to the traditional off-line settings: discrimination of minorities is one of them. Without clear legislative frameworks, in recent years platforms tried to reduce these issues with self-regulations. In this paper, we study the Airbnb's Nondiscrimination policy implemented at the end of 2016. The share of hosts who cannot reject - and potentially discriminate - guests more than doubled after two years from the policy. Accordingly, the number of guests with non-white names on the platform slightly increased. Yet, the proportion of guests with non-white names accepted by hosts who can discriminate guests did not signi cantly change after the policy.USSR, Education, Work History, Fertility Choices, and Later-Life Outcomes / Elisaveta Pronkina, Telmo Pérez-Izquierdo. -- Impact of Employment on Informal Caregiving to the Elderly Mothers in Europe / Elisaveta Pronkina. -- Online Discrimination and (Self) Regulation: Evaluating the Airbnb's Non discrimination Policy / Elisaveta Pronkina, Michelangelo Rossi.Programa de Doctorado en Economía por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidenta: Raquel Fonseca Benito.- Secretario: Jan Leonard Stuhler.- Vocal: Eric Bonsan

The heterogeneous effects of the Great Recession on informal care to the elderly

This paper studies the role of unobserved factors to measure the impact of the economic downturn on informal care availability to the elderly in Europe. We use the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which allows controlling for socio-demographic variables. Our results show that the impact of the Great Recession on care receipt depends not only on observed, but also on unobserved characteristics. For 21 percent of the sample, the effect is three to four times larger than the average effect for the entire sample. For 57 percent of the sample, there is no effect of the economic crisis, and this is due to unobservable factors. In our estimation process, we are able to characterize how this unobserved heterogeneity correlates with the observable variables. Moreover, we show that if the unobserved heterogeneity in the effect of the crisis is ignored, then we are not able to capture that there is no effect for more than half of the individuals, even if we allow for unobserved heterogeneity in the intercept of the model and for the heterogeneous effect of the crisis based on observables.Support from Agencia Estatal de Investigación del Gobierno de España, grant RTI2018-095231-BI00, and Comunidad de Madrid (Spain), grant EPUC3M11 (V PRICIT), are gratefully acknowledged

Behind the curtain: How did women's work history vary across Central and Eastern Europe?

This paper investigates the differences in female work experience across Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). We use retrospective SHARELIFE data to analyse women's work history from 1950 to 1990. We provide descriptive evidence that women's work experience varied across CEECs. Furthermore, we argue that comparing the former provinces of the Russian Empire in Lithuania and Poland provides a natural experiment, allowing us to disentangle the effect of the differential implementation of the Soviet regime from the pre-existing differences. We find that during communism, Lithuanian women worked 2 years more by age 50 relative to their Polish counterparts. This effect is one-third of that found in the East–West Germany comparison. We propose several potential mechanisms behind this finding: the degree of land collectivization, the Church's influence and the sectoral composition. Accordingly, this study's findings highlight the importance of country differences in CEECs.The funding from Comunidad de Madrid, Grant/Award Numbers: EPUC3M11 (V PRICIT), H2019/HUM-589; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, Grant/Award Numbers: ECO2017-86675-P, MCI/AEI/FEDER/UE, PGC 2018-096732-B-100

The COVID-19 curtain: can past communist regimes explain the vaccination divide in Europe?

As of November 2021, all former Communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe exhibit lower vaccination rates than Western European countries. Can institutional inheritance explain, at least in part, this heterogeneity in vaccination decisions across Europe? To study this question we exploit novel data from the second wave of the SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe) Covid-19 Survey fielded in Summer 2021 that covers 27 European countries and Israel. First, we document lower Covid-19 vaccine take-up amongst individuals above 55 years old who were born under Communism in Europe. Next, we turn to reunified Germany to get closer to a causal effect of exposure to Iron curtain regimes. We find that exposure to the Communist regime in East Germany decreases one’s probability to get vaccinated against Covid-19 by 8 percentage points, increases that of not wanting the vaccine by 4 percentage points. Both effects are quite large and statistically significant, and they hold when controlling for individual socio-economic and demographic characteristics. We identify low social capital -measured as voluntary work, political engagement, trust in people- as a plausible channel through which past Communist regimes would still affect individuals’ preferences for Covid-19 vaccination.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociale

USSR, education, work history, fertility choices, and later-life outcomes

This paper investigates how living under the USSR affected the life decisions of East European individuals. We use the retrospective SHARELIFE data to analyze respondents' choices from 1950 to 1990. In particular, we compare the reported choices of individuals in Lithuania (former-USSR) and Poland (former-Soviet Bloc), exploiting the common history of both countries until the end of the Second World War. We find that Lithuanian women increased educational attainments and accumulated 2 plus years of working experience by age 50 relative to Polish women. Moreover, we describe the indirect effect that improved working opportunities have on female education. We can identify this effect by looking at differential outcomes for men and women in the two countries. Similar findings hold once we compare all Baltic countries (former-USSR) toall Soviet Bloc countries and East to West Germany. Finally, we also observe a higher number of marriages during life and selective abortion based on the future child's gender under the USSR. These findings suggest that policies implemented in Socialist countries varied, and regimes affected individuals differently