HIV is a sexually transmitted disease and requires the interaction of two individuals to contract. Thus, HIV plays an important role on how couples interact by affecting their outside options and bargaining power. This paper exploits the exogenous variation in the roll-out of HIV treatment using a difference-in-difference method. When considering the full population, the effects of HIV treatment are close to zero. However, when considering heterogeneous education levels, we see that HIV decreases domestic violence for less educated women and increases it for their more educated counterparts. This is due to the fact that the marginal effect of HIV treatment depends on the initial conditions of the treated sample, such that women with no education benefit more.
Idiosyncratic weather shocks can have impacts in maternal behavior, especially among the rural poor, which is why measuring the effects of safety net mechanisms matter. This paper explores the effects of positive and negative rain shocks on prenatal care, maternal health, and early life inputs of rural women in Peru in times of weather shocks using a difference-in-difference-in-difference strategy. The results indicate that droughts decrease antenatal care, and extra rainfall improves postnatal care. Conditional cash transfers that condition on maternal healthcare do not reduce the negative impacts of droughts.
Gender norms are extremely costly to society. We exploit the fact that role models from the media can affect gender norms by performing a randomized control trial on adolescents in high schools in urban Peru. We will show teenagers movies where the main character succeeds in non-traditionally female (or male) activities and measure their impact on gender bias and school performance. This paper has the approval of the Ministry of Education of Peru, and they are considering the project as a pilot for education policy. Our project was one of five proposals selected after an international competition with dozens of applicants.
Juntos, the largest conditional cash transfer in Peru, provides pregnant women money for attending regular health care appointments. Up to 2021, the transfers were consistent, notwithstanding family size. This paper will explore the expansion of Juntos on fertility and contraception use among rural women in Peru using the Demographic and Health Survey.
Cervical cancer in Peru has the highest mortality rate among cancers for women in Peru. Since the year 2015, vaccination has been provided by the Ministry of Health in school settings. Using detailed data provided from the Ministry of Health, in which I have the ages and regions in which girls were vaccinated, I calculate the likelihood a girl was vaccinated. Using the demographic and health surveys from 2022 (and 2023, when available), I measure if getting the HPV vaccine in youth has medium-term improvements for young women in terms of women’s health, sexual health, and knowledge of the virus.