Bernal Raquel - Archivos para descargar

The Informal Labor Market in Colombia: Identification and Characterization
31/10/2008

In this paper, we study the extent and nature of employment informality in Colombia by using a new chapter on informality in the Encuesta Continua de Hogares (ECH) from August 2006 to December 2006. This chapter includes new questions deepening the information on coverage of social protection benefits, labor market trajectories, and motivations for sector of employment. Crucially, the availability of these new data allows us to measure informality in several ways and understand the differences and implications of using various definitions.

We then study the nature of informality in Colombia. In particular, we characterize informal workers in various dimensions that include socio-demographic characteristics, characteristics of the firm and job satisfaction measures. The main objective is to understand what types of individuals belong to formal and informal sectors, study the incentives and motivations of workers for belonging to one or other segment of the labor market (broadly defined in terms of informality), and analyze the consequences of not being covered by the regulatory framework. In doing this, we hope to gain some understanding about how different policy interventions could influence individuals’ occupation choices and workers’ well-being.

Child Care Choices and Children's Cognitive Achievement: The Case of Single Mothers, with Michael Keane (Forthcoming Journal of Labor Economics, 2011)

We evaluate the effects of home inputs on children's cognitive development using the sample of single mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Important selection problems arise when trying to assess the impact of maternal time and income on children's development. To deal with this, we exploit the (plausibly) exogenous variation in employment and child care use by single mothers generated by differences in welfare regulations across States and over time. In particular, the 1996 Welfare Reform, and earlier State policy changes adopted under federal waivers, generated substantial increases in work and child care use. Thus, we construct a comprehensive set of welfare policy variables at the individual and State level, and use them as instruments to estimate child cognitive ability production functions. We use local demand conditions as instruments as well.
Our results indicate that a year of childcare reduces child test scores by 2.1% (.114 standard deviations). This estimate is quite robust across a wide range of specifications and instrument sets. But we find important interactions with type of care, maternal education and child gender. Indeed, only informal care leads to significant reductions in cognitive outcomes. Formal center-based care does not have any adverse effect. In addition, the value of the maternal time input is greater for more educated mothers, and girls are more adversely affect by childcare than boys.

Trabajo Infantil en Colombia
17/10/2007


Parental Leave Policies, Welfare and the Distribution of Income with Anna Fruttero. Journal of Population Economics, 21: 779-825, 2008.
31/10/2008

(forthcoming Journal of Population Economics)

Quasi-Structural Estimation of a Model of Child Care Choices and Child Cognitive Ability Production with Michael Keane (Journal of Econometrics, vol 156(1), May 2010)
18/10/2007


The Effect of Maternal Employment and Child Care on Children s Cognitive Development. International Economic Review, Vol 49. No. 4, pp. 1173-1209, 2008.
31/10/2008

(forthcoming International Economic Review)

Formato
21/11/2007

(para estudiantes UniAndes/ex-alumnos aplicando a PhD fuera de Colombia)