Mothers at Work: How Mandating a Short Maternity Leave Affects Work and Fertility - Labour Economics
with Esther Mirjam Girsberger, Lena Hassani-Nezhad and Rafael Lalive
Media coverage: The Economist, The Regulatory Review, The Medical News, The Conversation
Switzerland mandated a 14-week paid maternity leave in 2005 when many firms already offered a similar benefit. While the mandate had only small and temporary effects on labor market outcomes of first-time mothers, it raised the share of those having a second child by three percentage points. Women employed in firms with prior paid leave sharply increased their subsequent fertility. In contrast, women employed in other firms did not change their fertility behaviour, but instead saw a persistent increase in their earnings after birth. This pattern of results suggests that firms with pre-mandate leave passed on (some of) their resulting cost-savings to their employees - “trickle down effects” - by making their maternity leave more generous than mandated, hiring temporary replacement workers and/or supporting mothers’ return to work in other ways.
Human Capital Investments Under Uncertainty: Income Risk and Children’s Education in India - Job Market Paper
Uncertainty about future income potentially affects current decisions that risk-averse poor households with credit and insurance constraints make related to human capital investments. I find that income risk has a large and negative ex-ante impact on educational attainments among poor, rural households in India dependent on income from rainfed agriculture. Specifically, high ex-ante income risk decreases the number of completed years of schooling, increases the share of people with only primary level education, and decreases the share of those with secondary education or more. In addition, it increases the likelihood that girls’ education gets interrupted leading them to fall behind, and decreases the amount that households spend on girls’ education. Since it is difficult to disentangle the ex-ante effects of income risk from the ex-post effects of past income shocks, I adopt a novel design using rainfall volatility and rainfall shocks as proxies for income risk and income shocks respectively, and in addition, exploit the additional variation introduced by irrigation dam construction. These findings suggest an important role for public policies that help protect households from the potential consequences of severe negative income shocks, such as weather, crop and health insurance.
School Closures and Parental Labor Supply: Differential Effects of Anticipated and Unanticipated Closures (Revise & Resubmit at Journal of Labor Economics)
with Rafael Lalive and Sofia Schroeter
This paper studies the labor supply responses of parents to anticipated school closures due to school holidays and unanticipated school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland. Using the variation in the timing of school holidays by region, we find that while both fathers and mothers reduce hours worked in response to school holiday closures, fathers reduce theirs much more than mothers. To identify the effects of pandemic school closures, we focus on marginal workers – those in occupations that were resilient to the pandemic labor demand shocks but had limited ability to work remotely and therefore, faced the greatest challenge in meeting increased child care needs. We find that the unanticipated pandemic school closures reduced the hours worked of parents somewhat less than for workers without children. We find almost no negative effects on mothers, while for fathers, we find that their labor supply was affected less than that of men without children. In our heterogeneity analyses, we discover that fathers of older children and/or with greater ability to work remotely were the least affected by these school closures. This suggests that parents were able to successfully accommodate the increased child care needs due to lack of in-person schooling without any negative impact on their labor supply
Paid Maternity Leave Mandate, Labor Market Behavior and Child Penalty: The Case of Switzerland
Minority languages and Political Participation in Ghana
With Sewoenam Chachu and Maame Adwoa Appiaah Gyekye-Jandoh
How Changes in Occupational Gender Shares Affect Wages
The Decade of Adjustment: A Review of Austerity Trends 2010-2020 in 187 Countries
ESS Paper Series (SECSOC) - ESS 53, International Labour Office
with Isabel Ortiz, Matthew Cummins and Jeronim Capaldo
Fiscal Space for Social Protection: Options to Expand Social Investments in 187 Countries
ESS Paper Series (SECSOC) - ESS 48, International Labour Office
with Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins