Fields of Interest: Labor, Education, Migration, Family Economics, Applied Econometrics

WORKING PAPERS

The Impact of Job Security on Workers' Health (with Judit Vall-Castellò), R&R, Journal of Population Economics

This version: March 2022

Job security can affect health by reducing workers' stress, effort, and risks. Using data from the Spanish National Health Survey, we estimate the effect of job security on health. To address endogeneity, we draw upon a reform that incentivized secure labor contracts for young (under 30) and female workers in Spain by reducing payroll taxes paid by employers. Combining Instrumental Variables and Differences-in-Differences estimation methods, we find that having a secure labor contract increases overall health measured by a one to five index by 0.30 and the probability of being mentally healthy by 0.17.

Crime Prevention Programs Improve Citizen’s

Mental Health: Evidence from Peru (with Elard Amaya-Chunga and Silvia Mendolia)

This version: January 2025

Among Latin American countries, Peru has one of the highest crime rates, with 9 out of 10 Peruvians reporting feeling unsafe walking the streets at night. This rooted-in-reality feeling of insecurity may harm citizens’ mental health. We study the consequences of the Peruvian Safe Neighborhood program, which increased police patrolling in selected neighborhoods, on the mental health of residents. We exploit the program’s staggered implementation and use data from the Demographic and Health Survey to precisely geolocate the respondents’ residencies. Our results show that enhanced crime prevention reduced the incidence of mental health problems by 6 percentage points. In particular, the program reduced depression, tiredness, concentration problems, suicide intentions, and sense of failure by 3–4 percentage points. The evidence suggests that improvements in mental health are driven by tangible changes in health-related behaviors. Following the implementation of Safe Neighborhood, there is an increase in healthcare utilization. 

Gender Peer Effects on the Glass Ceiling in Academia (with Flavia Coda-Moscarola and Sarah Zaccagni)

This version: March 2025

This paper examines whether a higher share of female associate professors in a department increases the likelihood that women are promoted to full professorships. Using comprehensive administrative data on the universe of Italian university faculty, we exploit exogenous variation in the strictness of the centralized National Scientific Qualification system, which determines eligibility for promotion across disciplines. We find that a ten percentage point increase in the share of female promotion-eligible peers raises the probability that female associate professors are promoted by two percentage points, while slightly reducing the likelihood of promotion for their male counterparts. These effects are robust to controls for research productivity. They are most pronounced in high-quality departments and those with a higher share of female full professors. These results suggest that supportive mechanisms such as coauthoring, mentoring, and lobbying among women may outweigh potential within-gender competition.

PUBLICATIONS

Parental Love Is Not Blind: Identifying Selection into Early School Start (with Nadia Campaniello and Ignacio Monzón)

European Economic Review, Forthcoming

Abstract

Do parents take into account their children's ability when deciding on their education? If so, are parents' perceptions accurate? We study this by analyzing a key educational decision. Parents choose whether their children start elementary school one year early. Do they select high ability kids to start early? We propose a novel methodology to identify the sign and strength of selection into early starting. We find robust evidence of positive selection. Had they started regularly, early starters would have obtained test scores 0.2 standard deviations higher than the average student. We also estimate the effect of early starting on test scores and find that the effect is heterogeneous.

Do Teachers’ Labor Contracts Matter?

(with Roberto Quaranta)

Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Published online, 02/09/2025

Previous literature on the effects of tenured and tenure-track versus non-tenure track professors on student performance at the university level finds mixed results. Our paper is the first to investigate whether student performance at school differs depending on whether tenured/tenure-track or non-tenure-track teachers teach them. We use data on standardized test scores from a representative sample of primary school students in Italy and information on their Italian and mathematics teachers’ labor contracts. Controlling for class-fixed effects, subject-fixed effects, and teacher characteristics, we find that students taught by non-tenure-track teachers exhibit, on average, a 0.18 standard deviation lower performance. Hence, job insecurity among primary school teachers is associated with lower student outcomes.

The Uneven Effects of Conditional Cash Transfers on Women and Men (with Roberto Quaranta)

Labour Economics, Volume 94, June 2025, 102695

We compare the effects of training-conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs on the labor market outcomes of women and men. We use the experiment in Del Boca, Pronzato, and Sorrenti (2021) where low-income households are randomly assigned to one of three groups: cash transfer conditional on a family-specific bundle of training programs, unconditional cash transfer with no access to those training programs, and no treatment. We exploit Social Security data, including all registered labor contracts in Italy. We find that cash transfers conditional on training have a positive and sizeable effect on males’ labor income and that this effect stays in place for at least two years after the program. Unconditional cash transfers did not affect men. In contrast, female employment is positively affected by both cash transfers regardless of access to the training, but the effect is smaller if they are conditional.

The Uneven Effect of Covid School Closures: Parents in Teleworkable vs. Non-Teleworkable Occupations 

Journal of Population Economics, 2025, Volume 38, article number 35

Covid school closures and the switch to online learning have had long-lasting detrimental effects on students. These adverse effects differ according to children’s family background. Teleworking parents can better monitor and help their children with online learning. In this paper, I test whether parents’ teleworkability affected children’s online learning during Covid school closures. I use panel data from INVALSI, the National Institute for the Evaluation of the School System, which includes the results of standardized tests given to all Italian students in grades 2 and 5 as well as parental characteristics. I compare children’s performance in grade 5, controlling for performance in grade 2, along two dimensions: whether they experienced Covid school closures between grade 2 and grade 5, and whether their parents work in teleworkable occupations. I also exploit variations in the length of Covid school closures across Italian regions. My results show that experiencing one hundred school closure days widens the gap between children of teleworkable and non-teleworkable parents in language tests by 0.02 standard deviations, while no robust effect arises for maths tests.

Bilingual Children's Advantage in Academic Performance (with Zoe Kuehn)

Journal of Demographic Economics, 2025, 1–20. doi:10.1017/dem

There are differences between bilingual and monolingual children in executive function and theory of mind, two cognitive skills which are related to academic performance. This paper tests if the academic performance of bilingual children is better than that of comparable monolingual children. This study is novel in three ways: (1) it uses a large and representative sample of children of Latino immigrants living in the US; (2) it focuses on widely-used standardized test scores; and (3) it compares monolingual and bilingual children, taking into account not only demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, but also home and school inputs. I find that bilingual children outperform their monolingual counterparts.

Naturalization and Immigrants' Health

Health Economics, October 2023

The "healthy immigrant effect" refers to the well-documented fact that immigrants are healthier than natives upon arrival, but their health level converges to that of natives over time. Unfortunately, little is known about whether environmental, institutional, or selective return migration mechanisms are behind the convergence. In this paper, I test whether immigrants' naturalization influences health convergence speed. Using restricted-access Spanish health data from the National and European Health Surveys, I first document the healthy immigrant effect. I then

estimate the impact of naturalization on health by exploiting that naturalization is possible after two years of residence for Latinoamerican immigrants and after ten years for all other immigrants. I find that naturalization worsens immigrants' health and thus accelerates the speed of convergence to natives' health. In particular, naturalization increases the propensity to suffer from varicose veins, cervical problems, lower back pain, constipation, depression, and anxiety. Changes in dietary habits and increases in employment are potential mechanisms behind these effects.

Language Economics (with Antonio Di Paolo)

In: Zimmermann, K.F. (eds) Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics. Springer, Cham., 2023 

Language economics addresses the socioeconomic gradients of foreign language proficiency for natives, proficiency and training in the host country language among immigrants, local languages in multilingual societies, and language-in education policies. This chapter summarizes the existing literature focusing on papers that address causal questions as they provide clear-cut recommendations to policymaking and individuals. The authors conclude that languages play a crucial role in explaining labor market and many other socioeconomic outcomes of both immigrants and natives and that different language and education policies have proven to produce several socioeconomic impacts, also beyond the affected generations.

Gender Mix and Team Performance: Differences between Exogenously and Endogenously Formed Teams (with Sarah Zaccagni)

Labour Economics, Volume 79, December 2022, 102269  

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the effect of gender composition of teams on performance, self-concept, working style, and individual satisfaction in endogenously and exogenously formed teams. We randomly divide a sample of high school students into two groups: we assign students in one group to teams of varying gender composition using random assignment and we allow the students in the other group to form teams freely. We find that students form disproportionately more male-predominant teams that those that would be formed under random assignment and that students in endogenously-formed gender-biased teams prefer even more gender-biased teams ex-post. Our results also show that female-predominant teams under-perform other types of teams but these differences disappear when teams are endogenously-formed.

Mathematics Camps: A Gift for Gifted Students? (with Flavia Coda-Moscarola e Sarah Zaccagni)

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Volume 191, November 2021, Pages 738-751.

We evaluate a mathematics camp for gifted high-school students. During the camp, students work in teams, trying to solve advanced mathematics problems with the help of manipulatives. We randomize participation in the camp and test the effects of such participation on problem-solving skills, self-concept, and career intentions. Results show that participants improve their problem-solving skills, especially in questions that require the use of logic. We also find positive effects on students' self-concept. Students with a lower school math score benefit more from the program. Finally, participating in the mathematics camp makes students in first high school grade more willing to go to university.

The Best in the Class

Economics of Education Review, Volume 84, October 2021, 102168.

I propose a novel methodology to identify how being the best in the class at the beginning of one's school life shapes future academic performance. My methodology exploits that some students are the best in the class because better students in their school were assigned to other classes and the random component of this allocation is a well-known function of students ranking in the school and the number of classes. I find a negative impact of being the best in the class on future performance: being the best in second grade reduces test scores by 0.34 standard deviation in fifth grade while being the best in fifth grade reduces test scores by 0.43 standard deviation in eighth grade. In contrast, being the second in the class improves future performance.

Are COVID Fatalities in the US Higher than in the EU, and if so, why? (with Shoshana Grossbard)

Review of Economics of the Household, January 2021, 19, p. 307–326.

The COVID crisis has severely hit both the United States and Europe. We construct comparable measures of the death toll of the COVID crisis suffered by US states and 35 European countries:  cumulative fatalities attributed to COVID at 100 days since the pandemic’s onset in a particular nation/state. When taking account of demographic, economic, and political factors (but not health-policy related factors) we find that, controlling for population size, cumulative deaths are between 100% and 130% higher in a US state than in a European country. We no longer find a US/EUROPE gap in fatalities from COVID after taking account of how each nation/state implemented social distance measures. This suggests that various types of social distance measures such as school closings and lockdowns, and how soon they were implemented, help explain the US/EUROPE gap in cumulative deaths measured 100 days after the pandemic’s onset in a state or country. 

Political Instability and Birth Outcomes: Evidence from the 1981 Military Coup in Spain (with Libertad González)

Health Economics, Volume 30, Issue 2, p. 328-341, February 2021.

Political instability produces stress, which may affect the mental and overall health of pregnant women and ultimately their children's outcomes. We estimate the impact of an episode that generated an exogenous shock to political stability, the 1981 military coup in Spain. Using birth register and election results data, we exploit the fact that municipalities with more votes for leftist and regional nationalist parties were more likely to suffer reprisals in case of coup success. Our results show that women who were pregnant during the coup were more likely to miscarriage but those born were healthier in terms of birth weight and absence of complications during the pregnancy or labor.

Later onset, fewer deaths from COVID  (with Shoshana Grossbard)

Pathogens and Global Health, 2020, Vol. 115, Issue 1, p. 1-3.

We test whether European countries or US states who experienced their first death from COVID-19 at a later date have fewer deaths from COVID  60 and 100 days after the start of the pandemic in their borders. Our sample consists of 29 European countries associated with the European Union and 50 U.S. states and we control for a number of demographic, economic and health-policy related factors that are likely to influence mortality. We find that late starting countries or states registered fewer deaths from COVID-19. Countries/states’ differential reliance on partial or complete lockdown policies helps explain an area’s advantage of being a late starter.

Intergenerational Residence Patterns and COVID-19 Fatalities in the EU and the US (with Shoshana Grossbard)

Economics & Human Biology, 2020, vol. 39, Dec 2020, 100934.

We study how patterns of intergenerational residence possibly influence fatalities from Covid-19. We use aggregate data on Covid-19 deaths, the share of young adults living with their parents, and a number of other statistics, for the 27 countries in the European Union, the UK, and all US states. Controlling for population size, we find that more people died from Covid in countries or states with higher rates of intergenerational co-residence. This positive correlation persists even when controlling for date of first death, presence of lockdown, Covid tests pc, hospital beds per capita, proportion of elderly, GDP pc, government’s political orientation, percentage urban, and rental prices. The positive association between co-residence and fatalities is led by the US. Our estimates pass the Oster test for selection on unobservables.

Recessions and Babies' Health (with Libertad González and Judit Vall-Castelló)

Economics & Human Biology, Volume 37, May 2020, 100836.

We study the effect of the business cycle on the health of newborn babies using 30 years of birth certificate data for Spain. Exploiting regional variation over time, we find that babies are born healthier when the local unemployment rate is high. Although fertility is lower during recessions, the effect on health is not the result of selection (healthier mothers being more likely to conceive when unemployment is high). We match multiple births to the same parents and find that the main result survives the inclusion of parents fixed-effects. We then explore a range of maternal behaviors as potential channels. Fertility-age women do not appear to engage in significantly healthier behaviors during recessions (in terms of exercise, nutrition, smoking and drinking). However, they are more likely to be out of work. Maternal employment during pregnancy is in turn negatively correlated with babies' health. We conclude that maternal employment is a plausible mediating channel.

Media coverage: The Atlantic, March 2014

Immigrants move where their skills are scarce: Evidence from English proficiency (with Zoë Kuehn)

Labour Economics, Vol. 61, December 2019, 101748.

This paper studies whether individuals tend to migrate to countries where their skills are scarce or abundant. Focusing on English language skills, we test whether immigrants who are proficient in English choose to move to countries where many or few individuals speak English. We use the introduction of English classes into compulsory school curricula as an exogenous determinant for English proficiency of migrants of different ages, and we consider cohort data on migration among 29 European countries, where English is not the official language and where labor mobility is essentially free. Our estimation strategy consists of refined comparisons of cohorts, and we control for all variables traditionally included in international migration models. We find that immigrants who are proficient in English move to countries where fewer individuals speak English, and where hence their skills are scarce. We also show that similar results hold for general skills.

The uneven impact of women's retirement on their daughters' employment

Review of Economics of the Household, November 2019, pages 1-27.

This paper studies the impact of women's retirement on their daughters' employment. Using SHARE and self-collected historical data on legal retirement ages in 20 European countries, I find that women's retirement leads to an increase in their daughters' employment only in countries with limited family policies and strong family ties. This positive effect can be explained by increases in in-kind transfers to daughters and grandchild care following retirement.

TV or not TV? The Impact of Subtitling on English Skills (with Augusto Rupérez Micola, Albert Banal-Estañol and Arturo Bris)

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, February 2019, Vol. 158, pages 487-499 

We study the influence of television translation techniques on the quality of English spoken worldwide. We identify a large positive effect for subtitled original version broadcasts, as opposed to dubbed television, on English proficiency scores. We analyze the historical circumstances under which countries opted for one of the translation modes and use it to account for the possible endogeneity of the subtitling indicator. We disaggregate the results by type of skills and find that television works especially for listening comprehension. Our paper suggests that governments could promote subtitling as a means to improve foreign language proficiency\ which, in turn, enhances economic performance. We also argue that the television translation mode can be used as an instrument to assess the impact of English proficiency at the macro level, as a substitute to linguistic distance, which has traditionally been used in the trade and migration literatures.

Media coverage: El País, Verne, and Marginal Revolution

Immigrant Networks and Remittances: Cheaper Together? (with Zoë Kuehn)

World Development, 2018, Vol. 111, pages 225-248

We estimate the causal effects of immigrant networks on individuals' remittance sending behavior for migrants from many different countries residing in Spain. Our methodology addresses typical issues that arise when estimating network effects: reverse causality, common unobserved factors, and self-selection. In particular, we instrument the size of networks by predicting the number of migrants in each location using the location's accessibility by distinct methods of transportation and information about how migrants from each country initially arrived in Spain. Our findings show that immigrants from above-average remitting countries remit more if they live in larger networks. Testing for mechanisms of network effects, we find that these migrants are more likely to send remittances via bank transfers which suggests that large networks of individuals who remit a lot might be better at sharing information about cheaper remittance channels (bank transfers compared to money orders in post offices or agencies). In line with this hypothesis we find that due to network effects migrants shy away from the most expensive remittance channels, potentially freeing resources for additional remittances. Our results suggest that network effects could boost policy efforts to lower remittance prices.

English Proficiency and Mathematics Test Scores of Immigrant Children in the US

Economics of Education Review, 2018, Vol. 64, issue C, 102-113

This paper explores whether native-immigrant differences in mathematics test scores can be accounted for by a lack of English proficiency. To identify the causal effect of English proficiency on test scores, I use the fact that language proficiency is closely linked to age at arrival, and that migrant children arrive at different ages from different countries. Using US data from the New Immigrant Survey, I find that English proficiency has no effect on mathematics tests and therefore they can be used to assess students' ability net of language effects.

Compulsory Schooling Laws and Migration across European Countries (with Zoë Kuehn)

Demography, December 2017, Vol. 54, Issue 6, pp 2181-2200

Educational attainment is a key factor for understanding why some individuals migrate and others do not. Thus, compulsory schooling laws which determine an individual's minimum level of education can potentially affect migration. We test whether and how increasing the length of compulsory schooling influences migration of affected cohorts across European countries, a context where labor mobility is essentially free. We construct a novel data base that includes information for thirty-one European countries on compulsory education reforms passed between 1950-1990. Combining this data with information on recent migration flows by cohorts, we find that an additional year of compulsory education reduces the number of individuals from affected cohorts who migrate in a given year by 9\%. Our results rely on the exogeneity of compulsory schooling laws. We perform a variety of empirical tests which all indicate that European legislators did not pass compulsory education reforms as a reaction to changes in emigration rates or educational attainment.

Returns to Education and Educational Outcomes: the Case of the Spanish Housing Boom

Journal of Human Capital, Vol. 10, Issue 2, Pages 235-265, 2016

This paper provides a novel identification strategy to estimate how returns to education affect school enrollment. It also explores the consequences of changes in returns to education on students' performance as measured by grade completion. The identification strategy relies on the fact that the construction sector employs mostly uneducated men and hence the Spanish housing boom significantly decreased the difference in returns to education between men and women. Results show that a 10% increase in the ratio of wages of educated to uneducated individuals leads to a 2% increase in the probability of being enrolled in school and a 0.2% increase in grade completion among 16 to 18 year-olds. These findings suggest that the influence of returns to education on educational outcomes is sizeable and wider than previously thought.

Should I stay or should I go? Sibling Effects in Household Formation (with Veruska Oppedisano)

Review of Economics of the Household, December 2016, Vol. 14, Issue 4, pp 1007-1027

In Southern Europe youngsters leave the parental home significantly later than in Northern Europe and in the United States. These countries have implemented policies that make young adults form a new household earlier. Do peer effects among siblings modify the effects of these policies? Estimating peer effects is challenging because of problems of reflection, endogenous group formation, and correlated unobservables. We overcome these issues in the context of a Spanish rental subsidy, exploiting the subsidy eligibility age threshold to analyze sibling effects. Our estimates show that sibling effects are negative and vanish for close-in-age siblings. The negative effects can be explained by the presence of an old or ill parent while positive effects arise in contexts where imitation predominates (from older to younger siblings and when siblings are close-in-age). We conclude that policy makers should target the household rather than the individual, and combine policies for young adults together with policies for the elderly.

The Effect of Product Market Competition on Job Security

Labour Economics, Vol. 35, August 2015, Pages 145-159

This paper studies the impact of product market competition on job security. I use differences between types of labor contracts to measure job security. The effect of competition on the use of different types of labor contracts is identified by changes in legislation that lead to exogenous shifts in competition. Using both worker data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey and firm data from the Spanish Business Strategies Survey, I show that job security decreases with competition. A one standard deviation increase in competition decreases the probability that a worker switches to a more secure labor contract by at least 22 percent.

Online Appendix

Fostering Household Formation: Evidence from a Spanish Rental Subsidy (with Veruska Oppedisano)

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy: Contributions, 2015, Vol. 15, issue 1

In Southern Europe youngsters leave their parental home significantly later than in Northern Europe and the United States. In this paper, we study the effect of a monthly cash subsidy on the probability that young adults live apart from parents and childbearing. The subsidy, introduced in Spain in 2008, is conditional on young adults renting accommodation, and it amounts to almost 20 percent of the average youngsters' wage. Our identification strategy exploits the subsidy eligibility age threshold to assess the causal impact of the cash transfer. Difference-in-Differences estimates show positive effects of the policy on the probability of living apart from parents, living with a romantic partner, and childbearing for 22 year-olds compared to 21 year-olds. Results persist when the sample is expanded to include wider age ranges. The effect is larger among young adults earning lower incomes and living in high rental price areas. This is consistent with the hypothesis that youngsters delay household formation because the cost is too high relative to their income.

Media coverage: Nada es Gratis, July 2012. RTVE, October 2021.

Working Women and Fertility: The Role of Grandmothers' Labor Force Participation (with Marian Vidal-Fernandez)

CESifo Economic Studies (2015), Vol. 61, Issue 1, pp 123-147

Grandmothers' availability for childcare has been shown to increase the labor force participation (LFP) and fertility of daughters. However, childcare availability depends highly on grandmothers LFP status. When grandmothers work, intergenerational income transfers to their daughters may increase at the expense of time transfers (through childcare). Using a Two-stage Two-steps Least Squares estimation, we exploit changes in legal retirement ages in Italy to explore the trade-off between mothers' LFP and daughters' LFP and fertility choices. We show that when mothers are out of the labor force, they provide more childcare, and their daughters' LFP and fertility increase and decrease, respectively. While the increase in LFP is consistent with previous studies analyzing the effect of mothers' childcare on daughters' LFP, the decrease in fertility seems counterintuitive. We argue that altruistic mothers who participate in the labor force increase monetary transfers at the expense of time transfers, to their daughters, and that this can have an ambiguous effect on fertility. Thus, our results show that income effects are stronger than time transfer (childcare provision) effects when mothers' unavailability is determined by LFP.

Does Foreign Language Proficiency Foster Migration of Young Individuals within the European Union? (with Zoë Kuehn)

The Economics of Language Policy, edited by Bengt-Arne Wickstroem and Michele Gazzola, MIT Press (ISBN: 978-0-262-03470-8)

Speaking the language of the host country eases migrants' integration and tends to boost their economic success in the country of destination. However, the decision to acquire language skills may in itself be determined by the intention to migrate. In addition, conditional on being a migrant, the relation between language skills and migrants' integration and economic success goes both ways. Using data on the study of foreign languages during compulsory education in European countries, we test whether and how much language proficiency determines migration flows across Europe. The European Union with basically unlimited labor mobility and pronounced differences in youth unemployment rates provides an ideal testing ground for our hypothesis. We find that speaking the language of a country increases the likelihood to migrate to that country almost fivefold.