Working Papers
Working Papers
Paternity Leave and Intimate Partner Violence (Job Market Paper) [draft coming soon]
Violence against women entails severe health and socioeconomic costs for women worldwide. This paper investigates how paternity leave impacts intimate partner violence (IPV). The policy changes within-family dynamics, potentially affecting the prevalence of conflict within households. I use high-quality administrative health records to simultaneously detect paternity leave eligibility and cases of abuse. I exploit the quasi-natural experiment resulting from a reform in Spain that expanded the duration of fathers' leave and made take-up mandatory for a share of the weeks. I apply a local difference-in-differences comparing women giving birth around the reform dates. Results show a reduction in the incidence of the most severe IPV cases by 0.3-0.7 percentage points for women in eligible families. The effect is persistent up until two years after birth.
Presented at Health Policy Internal Seminar (LSE); Doctorissimes Conference 2025; Research Seminar (UB).
Parental Time and Human Capital: Evidence from a Paternity Leave Reform [draft coming soon]
with Lídia Farré and Libertad González
This paper investigates the causal impact of parental time investments during childhood on human capital development. We exploit the quasi-natural experiment resulting from the introduction of paternity leave in Spain in 2007. This reform substantially raised the time fathers devote to childcare, not only in the short run but also in the longer run. Therefore, the leave generated a persistent change in parental time allocations. We use high-quality administrative data on test scores of students enrolled in the second year of public primary schools (7-8 years old) and implement a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the causal effect of the policy. We find that the increase in fathers’ time has a positive impact on children’s school performance. The effect is asymmetric on gender. Math grades increase by 11% of a standard deviation for boys, but we find no effect for girls, thus enlarging the gender gap in Maths. We explore the mechanisms behind this unequal impact and find suggestive evidence that fathers slightly select on the gender of their offspring when investing time in childcare.
Best Paper Award in the PhD in Economics Workshop 2023 of the University of Barcelona.
Presented at EALE Conference 2024; XVI Labour Economics Meeting (UB); 3rd Junior Economist Meeting (UniMi); CESifo/ifo Junior Workshop on the Economics of Education 2024; 2023 annual meeting of the Society of Economics of the Household (SEHO); Third Catalan Economic Society Conference; 3rd Workshop on Economics and Sustainability (URV); 47th Simposio de la Asociación Española de Economía.
Gender gaps in the valuation of working conditions
with Lídia Farré, Libertad González, and Laia Maynou
We conduct a survey experiment to examine gender differences in preferences for job attributes, including flexibility, commuting distance, and workplace climate. Both men and women are willing to trade 20–30% of their current wage to avoid inflexible jobs and long commutes. However, a notable gender difference emerges in the willingness-to-pay (WTP) to avoid sexual harassment. Women are willing to trade 50% of their wage for a secure workplace, 14 percentage points more than men. Among recent female victims, this aversion increases to 87%. These findings under-score the detrimental impact of sexual harassment on gender equality and talent allocation in the labor market.
Work in Progress
Paternity leave and maternal health, with Lídia Farré and Laia Maynou