Job Market Paper

Religious Media, Conversion and its Socioeconomic Consequences: The Rise of Pentecostals in Brazil (with Giulia Buccione)

Presented at: NEUDC 2023, Summer Meeting Econometric Society 2023 (Los Angeles), European Economic Society 2023 (Barcelona), RIGDE 2022, ASREC 2023 (Cambridge, MA), ASREC 2023 (Melbourne), ASREC 2022 (London), NEUDC 2021, LACEA 2021, SBE 2020

We study the socioeconomic consequences of adherence to the Pentecostal movement in Brazil, using exposure to a church-affiliated TV channel as a source of quasi-random variation in religiosity. Our empirical strategy exploits the placement of transmitters prior to the channel becoming religiously affiliated. Results show that exposure to this TV channel increases the number of Pentecostals in Brazil (30% increase compared with the baseline). This large change in religious adherence allows us to study its socioeconomic consequences. Consistent with the church's prescriptions, places exposed to this TV channel had higher fertility rates, lower female labor force participation, lower schooling for young women in the next generation, and more votes for Pentecostal candidates. We find no effects on male labor force participation or schooling for boys. Results persist in the long term. In an event-study framework, we exploit the expansion of RecordTV over time to show that other expansion strategies of the church do not drive the effects, ruling out reverse causality.

Working Papers

Free Childcare and the Motherhood Penalty: Evidence from São Paulo (with Joao Garcia and Rafael Latham-Proença) 

Presented at: NEUDC 2022, LACEA 2022, GeFam Workshop

Latin America consistently has some of the largest child penalties for female work globally, and while subsidized childcare is often advanced as a remedy, the literature on its effectiveness is scarce in this context. This paper estimates the impact of a rapid expansion of public childcare on mothers’ careers in the city of Sao Paulo. We leverage the rollout and expansion of childcare facilities, coupled with detailed data on the labor market and household characteristics, to identify effects on mothers’ labor force participation and earnings. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we compare the child penalty in districts that experienced a large and rapid expansion of childcare with districts with no significant expansion. Our results show that an additional seat per child leads to an increase of 6.7 p.p. (20%) in the mothers’ formal employment after the first child’s birth. We do not detect any effect of this expansion on mothers-to-be or fathers. Effects are stronger for low-education mothers and in areas with more women as household heads.

Congenital Disability Effects on Parents' Labor Supply and Family Composition:  Evidence from the Zika Virus Outbreak (with João Garcia and Rafael Latham-Proença) 

Severe child disability is among the most consequential events to parent's labor market outcomes, but there is still a small literature studying its effects. We study this question in the context of the Zika Virus epidemic in Brazil, which caused thousands of children to be born with microcephaly. We argue that several characteristics of the epidemic make it suitable as a natural experiment. Infection was sudden, and the link between Zika and microcephaly was unknown at the time. Using data on the universe of births and formal employment links in the country, we show that affected mothers had similar labor market trajectories to other mothers before childbirth. However, starting nine months after childbirth, they are 20% (10 p.p.) less likely to have a formal job. This effect persists over time. We do not observe any effects on fathers' labor market outcomes.  We also find that affected families have lower subsequent fertility, and fathers are more likely to divorce or leave the family.

Work in Progress

Religious Mayors and Sexual Education in Schools (Draft coming soon!)

Pentecostalism is one of the fastest-growing religious movements in the world, already constituting nearly 15% of the population in Latin America and Africa. This new religion preaches more conservative values, influences the social behavior of the faithful, and, in Brazil, has been increasingly involved in politics, raising the question of the socioeconomic implications of their expansion. In this paper, I analyze the impact of mayors from Pentecostal-affiliated parties on teenage pregnancy, employing close-race elections to identify causal effects. I find an increase of 5 births per thousand teenagers (15% above the baseline) in municipalities where mayors from Pentecostal-affiliated parties won by a narrow margin. The mechanism I explore is the removal of sexual education activities from municipal schools. Mayors in Brazil can appoint the headmaster of municipal schools, thus choosing the ones that better align with their views. I find that municipal schools are 20 p.p. less likely to offer sexual education activities in municipalities where mayors of parties affiliated with the Pentecostal church won by a small margin of votes. I do not find any effects on state schools, as mayors do not appoint the headmaster in these schools.