• "Gender Education Gaps and Household Labor Supply: Causal Evidence from Turkey", with Luca Paolo Merlino. R&R at Labour Economics. New version.  

This paper studies how increases in women's education reshape household labour supply, exploiting Turkey's 1997 compulsory schooling reform in a regression discontinuity design. Because the income and bargaining channels of women's education carry opposite implications for husbands' labour supply, the husband's response identifies the dominant channel. Women affected by the reform work and earn more while their husbands work less, indicating that the income effect dominates, especially where gender norms are more traditional. The division of unpaid work is unchanged, so husbands capture part of the gains as leisure; women nonetheless become more financially independent.

• "To Veil or Not to Veil? Assessing the Removal of Headscarf Ban in a Muslim Country", with Wenqi Lu. R&R at Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. New version. 

This paper examines how removing identity-based institutional restrictions affects women's economic participation by exploiting the 2013 repeal of a longstanding headscarf ban in Turkey. We combine two nationally representative surveys and use statistical matching and machine-learning models to predict women's veiling status and identify treatment effects by comparing veiled and non-veiled women's labor market outcomes in a difference-in-differences framework. The repeal led to a significant rise in public sector employment among veiled women, driven by both higher employment rates and shifts away from self-employment and unpaid family work. In contrast, non-veiled women experienced a decline in public sector jobs, suggesting a substitution effect, with suggestive evidence of some increase in education-occupation mismatch among veiled women in the public sector after the repeal. Consistent with this pattern, effects are concentrated among more educated veiled women, the group most likely to qualify for public positions. We find no differential effects across regions with high and low veiling prevalence or local Islamist-party vote shares, suggesting that institutional access, rather than local acceptance or political favoritism, drives women's labor market response to the reform.

• "Improving Preschool Quality for Disadvantaged Children", with Thomas van Huizen. R&R at Economics of Education Review.  

Ensuring equal access to high-quality early childhood education is a key policy challenge. This paper examines how pedagogical leaders (coaches) affect preschool quality and child development, focusing on preschools for children aged 2--3 from disadvantaged backgrounds. Leveraging a nationwide reform in the Netherlands and using unique data on classroom observations and early childhood development, we find that pedagogical leaders improved the quality of classroom interactions. Furthermore, the policy increased the frequency of small--group educational activities with disadvantaged children. Consistent with the evidence on preschool quality, our results indicate that the policy reform improved the language development of disadvantaged children. However, there is no evidence of gains in executive functioning, social-emotional development and motor skills. Exploring potential channels, we document that affected teachers are more frequently coached, while ruling out alternative explanations such as changes in child and teacher composition, staff--child ratios, classroom composition, or other professional development activities.

• "Preschool Hours and Child Development", with Thomas van Huizen and Ora Oudgenoeg - Paz. A new draft will be available soon

This paper estimates the causal effect of additional preschool hours on child development, exploiting a nationwide reform that raised entitlement hours in targeted early childhood education programs for disadvantaged children aged 2.5--4 from 600 to 960 in the Netherlands. Using detailed child-level assessment data we collected on multiple developmental domains measured before age four, we find that additional entitled preschool hours significantly improve language and fine motor skills among disadvantaged children, with sizable but less precise gains in other domains and none for non-disadvantaged children. These gains do not operate through parental labor supply, entry age, or home learning. Drawing on administrative registry data for the full population of children, we further show that additional hours improve on-time grade progression and reduce the need for special education in primary school, concentrated in the group the reform targeted. These findings provide novel causal evidence that extra preschool hours improve multiple domains of child development among disadvantaged children and that the gains persist as they enter primary school, thereby reducing early educational inequalities.

• "Gender Wage Gap, Maternal Bargaining Power and Intergenerational Transmission of Attitudes". A new draft will be available soon

This paper explores the causal effect of mothers' relative wages on the intergenerational transmission of gender role attitudes by exploiting local market-level potential wages for parents when their child is aged 10-15. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, while I find no effect of potential wages on the gender role attitudes of parents, I provide evidence that higher relative wages for mothers during their children's adolescence increase the similarity between the traditional gender role attitudes of mothers and their children in adulthood. Examining potential mechanisms, the results show that an increase in mothers' relative potential wages leads to greater parental involvement, particularly for mothers with more traditional gender role attitudes. The results support the household bargaining explanations.