Research

In this paper we exploit the introduction in February 2018 of a new paid parental leave program to care for a seriously ill child in Chile (SANNA) to identify the role of both economic incentives and gender norms on families' decisions regarding market versus home production specialization. To measure the impact of economic incentives, we utilize the design of the SANNA program, which covers the beneficiary's wages up to a specific threshold, beyond which the benefit remains fixed. The efficient allocation of this benefit depends on the income levels of family members and whether their income exceeds the threshold. To investigate the role of gender norms, we compare the effect of economic incentives among older, more traditional families and younger families. Our results indicate that both gender norms and economic incentives affect parental leave allocation. We estimate that older families pay a cost of USD 1,200 for adhering to traditional gender norms compared to younger families.

Advertising significantly shapes societal perceptions, especially regarding body image. Despite decades of evidence, this literature faces a measurement challenge. Humancoded methods for assessing body image in ads are costly to scale up to large sample sizes, complicating continuous monitoring and limiting the quantification of potential biases. Our study highlights the potential of Artificial Intelligence for cost-effective scalability, applying the method over a five-year period. Using Computer Vision, this paper analyzes body image representations in advertisements from Chilean newspapers (2016-2021), finding a statistically significant difference in demographic characteristics between faces in ads and the general population. Men and women in ads exhibit a lower Body Mass Index (BMI), with a larger bias for women, equivalent to a 5-to-10-pound "weight penalty". Women are also underrepresented in ads. This method could enable real-time monitoring and application in other countries.

This paper examines the effects of a labor reform in Chile that increased the cost of using temporary agency workers (TAW). Using a dynamic industry equilibrium model and a unique plant-level dataset, we find TAWs are imperfect substitutes for regular workers, have lower productivity and exert less wage bargaining power. The reform increased both fixed and variable costs associated with TAWs, constraining firms' ability to cope with volatility while increasing TAWs' bargaining power. Our model predicts a rise in output prices, with labor misallocation accounting for half of this surge, contingent upon the elasticity of substitution between worker types.

Technological advancements and automation have reshaped work. In this paper, we examine gender differences in response to these changes. We identify a narrowing and then reversing gender gap in the probability of automation over the last four decades, which cannot be attributed to a single mechanism. This shift is explained by newer cohorts of women entering lower-risk jobs, who have more years of schooling and are better prepared to access lower-risk jobs than their predecessors. They also face fewer gender norms, which lessens their home production responsibilities and shifts their labor preferences toward jobs with longer hours and less predictable schedules. Often seen as less favorable for maintaining a work-life balance, these occupations typically face a lower probability of automation. We do not find evidence that the closing gender gap in automation probability is explained by increasing returns to social skills or by women's comparative advantages in occupations requiring more social skills.

In this paper I analyze the equilibrium effects of convex capital adjustment costs on quantity dynamics and asset prices in a real business cycle model when the representative agent has Epstein-Zin preferences. Capital adjustment costs make it costly for agents to smooth fluctuations in consumption through the production sector, inducing them to take more consumption risk. I show this model accounts for the main statistical features of macroeconomic aggregate quantities. At the same time, adjustment costs increase the equity risk premium, with the mean stock return and its standard deviation in the order of magnitude consistent with the data. The model also produces a stable risk-free rate, and comes close to matching its average return.