Abstract: Recessions often force households to default on debt. We use a regression discontinuity design to study how expanding the safety net to middle-income households during a recession reduces default and integrates households into the credit market. Receiving recurrent cash transfer payments, mostly into digital bank accounts, protects households’ creditworthiness by reducing defaults on credit cards and debt with non-financial firms and encourages the use of digital financial products. It expands access to bank loans but only among individuals with verifiable formal incomes. Social protection mitigates consumption declines and defaults in the short-run and expands access to credit in the long-run.

Abstract: This paper studies how changes in family income influence domestic violence against women. I study municipalities in Colombia with high levels of coffee production and exploit negative shocks to coffee prices as an exogenous source of variation in household income. I find that municipalities with more intensive coffee production experience significant increases in domestic violence following a negative coffee price shock. To explore underlying mechanisms, I estimate heterogeneous effects and show that the impact is strongest in contexts with more severe gender inequality. Using individual-level data, I find similar effects for rural women residing in coffee-producing municipalities. Interestingly, women with decision-making power within the household are less likely to experience domestic violence in response to a negative income shock. This result highlights the role of female empowerment in mitigating the consequences of economic distress. 

Abstract: This paper examines whether increasing short-term benefits from social protection can incentivize greater affiliation with formal institutions in contexts of high labor informality. I study a 2022 reform in Peru that substantially relaxed eligibility requirements for maternity leave, effectively transforming maternity benefits into a short-term return on contributions to the social security system. Using panel data from the Peruvian National Household Survey (ENAHO), I implement a dynamic difference-in-differences design that compares women at the same stage relative to childbirth before and after the reform. First, I assess whether the reform increased contributory health insurance affiliation during childbirth—a prerequisite for accessing maternity leave. Then, I examine labor market outcomes, focusing on changes in informal employment and overall employment status. This approach provides new evidence on the role of short-term contributory benefits as formalization incentives for women in informal labor markets, even in the absence of strong enforcement mechanisms.

Abstract: We document that lower income individuals in Santiago, Chile are exposed to higher concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 while at home and when taking into account their locations throughout the entire day. The exposure gradient across income deciles when assuming individuals are at their residence 24 hours a day is similar to that when considering their location at each hour of the day as reported on the reference day in an origin-destination survey. We use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to explore the effect of the declaration of critical air quality episodes, which activate city-wide restrictions on private vehicles among others, on air pollution concentrations. We find  that the declaration of critical air quality episodes leads to small and mostly statistically insignificant decreases in air pollution overall but the effects vary considerably across neighborhoods and hours of the day.      

Abstract: We study inequality in monitoring and exposure to particulate matter air pollution in four metropolitan areas of Latin America, Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, Mexico, Gran Santiago, Chile, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. We find that the population residing in close proximity to at least one monitoring station in Bogota, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo generally have higher educational attainment and income. In contrast, in Gran Santiago, education levels are generally higher further from monitoring stations. Considering only census geographic units that contain a monitoring station, we find that areas where individuals with lower educational attainment reside tend to be exposed to higher pollution levels. While we find small and mostly insignificant disparities in mean annual concentrations of particulate matter, we find that lower education quintiles experience significantly more hours of extreme pollution relative to the highest education quintile. Non-linear effects of pollution imply that the small disparity in mean concentrations likely masks large disparities in the negative impacts of air pollution. Our findings indicate that in Bogota, Mexico City, and Sao Paulo, air pollution exposure is likely to be better monitored for those with higher educational attainment and income, and in all four cities, lower income and education groups have greater exposure to extreme levels of air pollution.