Belén Rodríguez Moro

Publications:

Moro, Belén Rodríguez. "The unchanging divide: housework and labor responsibilities in late family stages." SERIEs (2025): 1-41.

Working Papers:

Children, Household Specialization and Relationship Quality (with Olatz Román-Blanco)

Work in Progress:

Time After Birth: Parenthood and the Reorganization of Daily Life (with Alicia de Quinto, Libertad González, and Laura Hospido)

Gender differences in entrepreneurship: the role of family (with Giovanna Vallanti)

Fertility and Time Use Changes

joint project with Alicia de Quinto, Laura Hospido, and Libertad González

[DRAFT AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST]

Note: : The figure presents predicted means of net affect — defined as experienced happiness minus the average of negative emotions (stress, pain, sadness, and tiredness) — when doing childcare for mothers and fathers across five child age groups (0–2, 3–5, 6–8, 9–11, and 12+). Data come from the ATUS Well-Being Modules administered in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2021. In these modules, respondents report how they felt while performing three randomly selected activities lasting at least three minutes, with feelings measured on a six-point Likert scale (0 = not at all, 6 = very much). Predicted means are estimated separately by gender, controlling for age, educational attainment, marital status, diary weekday, and year fixed effects to absorb wave-specific reporting differences. Estimates are weighted using ATUS survey weights. Vertical bars represent 95% confidence intervals. The estimates capture conditional associations rather than causal effects, and should be interpreted as descriptive evidence.

ABSTRACT:

This paper examines how the transition to first parenthood reshapes parents' daily lives by altering both the allocation and the experienced quality of time, and what those changes reveal about parental preferences. Using data from the American Time Use Survey (2003–2024), we estimate the dynamic effects of childbirth on time use via a pseudo–event-study design based on repeated cross-sections, validated against longitudinal child-penalty benchmarks for employment and earnings. We document large and persistent gender asymmetries in the \textit{composition} of time, but not in its total quantity: mothers sharply reduce market work while substantially increasing unpaid childcare and housework, whereas fathers make smaller adjustments in the opposite direction, so that total work time rises similarly for both parents. In a second step, we use the ATUS Well-Being Modules to ask whether these compositional asymmetries reflect differential preferences. We find that mothers and fathers experience the same activities—paid work, childcare, housework, and leisure—with statistically indistinguishable levels of net affect and meaningfulness at every stage of parenthood. This preference-equivalence is difficult to reconcile with differential tastes as the driver of the gender gap in time use, and points instead toward external and gender norm constraints as the primary shapers of post-birth time allocation.

See our post in Nada Es Gratis,

Presented at: SAEe 2025

Gender differences in entrepreneurship: the role of family

joint project with Giovanna Vallanti (LUISS)

[DRAFT AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST]

ABSTRACT:

This paper examines the gendered nature of intergenerational transmission in entrepreneurship among Ph.D. graduates in Italy. Using rich administrative survey data, we find that having entrepreneurial parents significantly increases the likelihood of entrepreneurship, but the effect is weaker for women, especially daughters of entrepreneurial mothers. We explore this asymmetry through the lens of local gender norms, proxied by provincial employment gaps and instrumented using historical referendum data. Preliminary results suggest that mothers may discourage daughters from entrepreneurship in traditional environments, consistent with theories of imperfect empathy.

Presented at: GRAPE Conference 2025

Children, household specialization, and relationship quality

joint project with Olatz Román-Blanco (Mannheim University)

DRAFT AVAILABLE HERE

Note: This graph plots the event-time dummy coefficients obtained from estimating a dynamic TWFE equation with RQ as an outcome and using the robust estimator proposed by Callaway and Sant'Anna (2023). Confidence intervals are estimated at 95% level. Standard errors are clustered a the couple level. Data source is Understanding Society

ABSTRACT:

We investigate how having children impacts the quality of couples' relationships, a proxy of the non-material gains from being in a relationship. Using a novel measure of relationship quality (RQ), we perform a dynamic difference-in-differences estimation around the birth of the first child. We find a sharp and lasting decrease in RQ immediately after birth. We attribute this effect to changes in household specialization. Traditional gender-based specialization prevails after birth, regardless of the baseline distribution of tasks within the couple. Leveraging heterogeneous changes in household specialization after birth, we find that couples undergoing larger rearrangements also suffer larger RQ drops.

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