Job Market Paper:

The effect of fertility on labor market informality among skilled and unskilled female workers

(presented at 5th REAP-SBE Meeting; 24th Annual LACEA Meeting in Puebla-Mexico; and 41st Meeting of the SBE, in 2019)

[ Latest draft ]

Abstract: Labor market informality is widespread across developing countries and it is associated with worse labor market outcomes such as lower wages, job stability, and labor force attachment. On the other hand, informal work arrangements, particularly self-employment, in general offer greater labor supply flexibility which may be a desirable amenity for women with child care responsibilities. In this paper I analyze how the presence of young children in the household affects the decision of women to work in the formal or informal sectors. To do so, I use Brazilian data, motivated by the relative rigidity of labor legislation in Brazil, the high prevalence of informal work and the scarcity of part-time jobs in the formal sector. The longitudinal nature of the data allows for a rich empirical specification that controls for state-dependence and unobserved heterogeneity in decisions with respect to both participation and whether to work in the formal sector. The results show that, among low-education women, observed fertility variables are endogenous with respect to the decision to work in the formal sector, and that the presence of children in the household has a substantial negative effect on the probability of having a formal job conditional on labor force participation. Among college-educated women, however, fertility is not a relevant determinant of informality rates. In light of Ribar (1992), that shows that market and non-market child-care goods and services are substitutes and have, respectively, positive and negative income elasticity, these results suggest that college-educated women in Brazil may have lower willingness to pay for flexibility due to greater access to child-care goods and services. Hence, policies that increase access to child-care for low-education women may have spillover effects of reducing informality rates and the burden of fertility on labor market outcomes.

Working Papers:

How and when: disentangling cash and care effects of CCTs on birth outcomes (with Cecilia Machado and Marina Palma) - Draft coming soon

(scheduled for presentation at 26th Annual Meetings SOLE - 2021)

Abstract: While conditional cash transfers are a powerful tool to alleviate poverty and improve many short run socioeconomic outcomes of targeted families, very little is know about how and when these programs improve in utero conditions of babies. Moreover, there is scarce evidence on weather additional transfers to already eligible families can improve outcomes at birth. This paper fills these two gaps by exploring quasi-random income variation on one of the world's largest CCT programs - the Bolsa Família in Brazil - taking advantage of sharp eligibility criteria that are due to birth dates of family members. Overall, the results point to a null effect of additional income on birth outcomes, even when transfer amounts are sizeable. We also find no behavioral responses on conditionality compliance and prenatal care of pregnant mothers. However, additional cash transfers to women meeting adequate prenatal care reduces preterm birth by 6-8 percent, with effects concentrated in transfers that occur in the first trimester of pregnancy. Our findings speak to the role complementarity between prenatal care and family income in producing health at birth: even small amounts of cash transfers can be effective in improving birth outcomes when coupled with adequate prenatal care.

Labor market rigidity, female life-cycle labor supply and fertility (available upon request)

Abstract: This paper studies the relationship between life-cycle labor supply decisions of women between formal and informal labor market activities and fertility behavior. I specify a dynamic discrete choice model which takes into account choices on the extensive (participation) and intensive margins (full/part-time) of labor supply and self-selection to self-employment or formal/informal jobs. The model is estimated using Brazilian data and is able to reproduce well its main features. The structural approach allows me to analyze how fertility, coupled with scarce demand for part-time work in the formal sector, affects self-selection of mothers into informality, and the consequent impacts on human capital accumulation and lifetime labor income. The results show that full-time work in the formal sector is the category with the highest utility costs arising from the presence of young children in the household. Counterfactual exercises suggest that increasing maternity leave or the demand for part-time work in the formal sector has small effects on participation, earnings and human capital, but are very effective in preventing mothers from leaving formal jobs in favor of informal ones.

Born in Bolsa Familia Dataset: linking vital records, social welfare registries and longitudinal Bolsa Familia payroll data (with Cecilia Machado and Marina Palma)

Abstract: In this article we describe the Born in Bolsa Família dataset which contains information on 6.1 million births that happened in low-income families in Brazil between 2011-2015. The dataset was constructed by linking administrative records from the Brazil's conditional cash transfer scheme Bolsa Família and its social security registry Cadastro Único to national natality and mortality registries. We compute sensitivity and accuracy analysis of our linkage procedure using a gold standard dataset of known mother-child pairs. We find that we recover between 60-75% of all births that happened in families registered with Brazil social security systems depending on the year of analysis, at very high precision with a positive predictive value >98%. Finally, using the dataset, we uncover correlations between conditional cash transfers and health at birth, and find suggestive evidence that transfers can improve birth outcomes.

Work in progress:

An alternative approach to the initial conditions problem in dynamic, binary response panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity