We study the effect of women’s education on fertility and children’s health during a period of gender equalization and women’s greater access to economic opportunities. In 1980, Spain raised the minimum working age from 14 to 16, while the compulsory education age remained at 14. This reform changed the within-cohort incentives to remain in the educational system. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the reform delayed fertility but did not impact the completed fertility of affected women. We also show that the reform was detrimental to the health of the children of affected mothers at delivery. We document two channels for this adverse effect: the postponement in the entrance of motherhood and the deterioration of mothers’ health habits (such as smoking and drinking). However, in the medium run, these more educated mothers reverse the adverse health shocks at birth through maternal vigilance and investment in their children’s health habits.

We examine the impact of raising the minimum age of marriage to 18 years old in Mexico. Using a difference-in-differences model that takes advantage of the staggered adoption of this reform across states, we find a large reduction in the number of registered child marriages. However, we find no effect on school attendance or early fertility rates. We provide evidence that this is driven by a substitution of formal marriage for informal unions. This suggests that when informal unions are a viable option for young couples, age-of-marriage reforms are not enough to prevent early unions and their negative consequences.

In 1980, a few years after the democratization process, Spain raised the minimum work- ing age from 14 to 16, while the compulsory education age remained at 14. This re- form changed the within-cohort incentives to remain in the educational system. We use a difference-in-differences approach, where our treated and control individuals only differ in their month of birth, to analyze the gender asymmetries in mortality generated by this change. The reform decreased mortality at ages 14-29 among men (6.4%) and women (8.9%), mainly from the reduction in deaths due to traffic accidents. However, the reform also increased mortality for prime-age women (30-45) by 7%. This is driven by increases in HIV mortality, as well as by diseases related to the nervous and circulatory system. We show that health habits of women deteriorated as a consequence of the reform, while this was not the case for men. The gender differences in the impact of the reform on smoking and drinking have to be understood in the context of the gender equalization process that affected women were experiencing when the reform took place. All in all, these patterns help explain the narrowing age gap in life expectancy between women and men in many developed countries while, at the same time, they provide important policy implications for middle income countries that are undergoing those gender equalization processes right now.  

We study the impact on student achievement of a nationwide teacher pay-for-performance program implemented in Peruvian public secondary schools in 2015. Schools compete in a tournament primarily based on 8th graders’ performance in a standardized test, where the principal and teachers of the top 20 percent of schools receive a substantial bonus. We perform a difference-in-differences estimation comparing the internal grades of 8th and 9th graders of the same school, before and after the program. We find a precisely estimated zero effect on student achievement, and we reject impacts greater than 0.017 standard deviations, well below those previously found in the literature. We provide evidence against a series of potential explanations, and argue that this zero effect could be a consequence of teachers’ uncertainty about how to improve their students’ performance in the standardized test tied to the bonus.

While vocational education is meant to provide occupational-specific skills that are directly employable, their returns may be limited in fast-changing economies. Conversely, general education should provide learning skills, but these may have little value at low levels of education. This paper contributes to this debate by exploiting a reform introduced in Spain in 1990 that postponed students’ choice between these two educational pathways from age 14 to 16. To identify exogenous changes in this policy, we instrument its staggered implementation with pre-reform province shares of students in general education interacted with cohort fixed effects. Results indicate that, by shifting educational investment from vocational to general education after age 16, the reform improves occupational outcomes and wages. However, these positive effects are concentrated among middle to high-skilled individuals. In contrast, those who acquire only basic general education have worse long-term employment prospects than vocationally-trained individuals.

This paper examines the effect of immigration on workplace safety, a new and previously unexplored outcome in the literature. We use a novel administrative dataset of the universe of workplace accidents reported in Spain from 2003 to 2015 and follow an IV strategy based on the distribution of early migrants settlements across provinces. Our results show that the massive inflow of immigrants between 2003 and 2009 reduced the number of workplace accidents by 10,980 for native workers (7% of the overall reduction during that period). This is driven by Spanish-born workers shifting away from manual occupations to those involving more interpersonal interactions. Immigrant flows during the economic crisis (2010-2015) had no impact on natives’ workplace safety. The scarcity of jobs during that period could have prevented shifts between occupations. Finally, we find no effects of immigration on the workplace safety of immigrants. These results add a previously unexplored dimension to the immigration debate that should be taken into account when evaluating the costs and benefits of migration flows.

Although the majority of the literature has confirmed that recessions are beneficial for adults' health and babies' outcomes at delivery, this effect should not necessarily be the same for children. In this paper, we study the effect of business cycle conditions on infant underweight, overweight, and obesity. We exploit eight waves of repeated cross-sectional data (1987–2012) of the Spanish National Health Survey for children aged 2–15 and use the regional unemployment rate of the trimester of the interview as a proxy for the business cycle phase at the local level. We find that an increase in the unemployment rate is associated with lower obesity incidence, especially for children under 6 years old and over 12 years old. However, economic shocks also proof to have potentially negative consequences as they increase the prevalence of infant underweight for the same age groups. Moreover, we show that the possible mechanisms through which the cycle is impacting infant obesity is the nutritional composition of the children's diet, as well as, increases in the frequency of exercise. We provide some evidence that suggests that the impact of business cycle conditions on infant weight disorders have little objective health consequences in the short run. However, the potential long-term effects may become important as underweight during childhood is associated with worse outcomes later in life.

This paper investigates the causal link between healthcare access and the help-seeking behavior of intimate partner violence (IPV) victims. Healthcare access can be an important entry point for screening or detecting IPV. Doctors are required by law to report any injuries to a judge if they suspect they are the result of a crime and can inform and direct victims to IPV services. We exploit the 2012 reform in Spain that removed access to the public healthcare system for undocumented immigrants. We use court reports and protection order requests from the Judicial Branch of the Spanish government to perform a difference- in-differences approach, comparing the help-seeking behavior of foreign and Spanish women before and after the reform. We find that the impact of the reform was immediate; foreign women’s IPV reporting and application for protection orders decreased by 12%. This effect is entirely driven by regions with stronger enforcement of the reform. We show suggestive evidence that the reform left the underlying levels of IPV incidence unaffected. Instead, the results are driven by a reduction in injury reports by medical centers. Our findings are important given the increase in migration flows globally as well as for current debates on granting/limiting access to healthcare for marginalized groups.

This paper sheds new light on the mortality effect of delaying retirement by investigating the impacts of the 1967 Spanish pension reform. This reform exogenously changed the early retirement age, depending on the date individuals started contributing to the Social Security system. Those contributing before 1 January 1967 maintained the right to voluntarily retire early (at age 60), while individuals who started contributing after that date could not voluntarily claim a pension until the age of 65. Using the Spanish administrative Social Security data, we find that the reform delayed the individuals’ labour market exit by around half a year and increased the probability that individuals take up disability pensions, partial pensions, and no pensions. We show evidence that delaying exiting employment increases the hazard of dying between the ages of 60 and 69, for almost all individuals. Heterogeneous analysis indicates that the increase in mortality is stronger for those employed in low-skilled, physically and psychosocially demanding jobs. Moreover, we show that allowing for flexible retirement schemes, such as partial retirement, mitigates the detrimental effect of delaying retirement on mortality.

We conduct a randomized control trial at a distance learning university to compare three monetary incentive schemes with different performance targets for students. The first treatment (Threshold) provides a reward for students who achieve a grade threshold, the second (Top percentile) for students in the top of their class, and the third (Improvement) for those that improve their expected grade. As students do not interact personally, the setting is particularly advantageous for controlled experimentation and avoids possible spillovers. We find no average effects for incentives but there are interactions between types of students and incentive treatments. The effect of the “Top percentile” incentive is positive for students with a high and negative for students with a low intrinsic motivation. The “Threshold” and “Improvement” incentives have positive effects on students with more experience with the incentivized task and negative effects on those with less experience. Interestingly, incentives foster students’ strategic behavior that is triggered by the way performance is measured (multiple choice exam with penalties for incorrect answers). The study emphasizes the need to understand how the characteristics of different incentive schemes interact with those of the persons being incentivized.