Economía / Profesores / Planta / Bernal Raquel / Documentos de trabajo
Bernal Raquel - Documentos de trabajo
Parental Leave Policies, Welfare and the Distribution of Income with Anna Fruttero31/10/2008
Journal of Population Economics 21: 779-825, 2008.
This paper uses a general equilibrium model of marriage and divorce to assess how public policies on maternity and paternity leave and leave benefits affect intra-household decision making, family structure, intergenerational mobility and the distribution of income. We calibrated our model to replicate some characteristics relevant to the interaction between the marriage and labor market. We start with a benchmark economy in which women take time off with their children. We then analyze how this economy is affected by three different parental leave policies: availability of paternity leave, paid maternity leave benefits and paid paternity and maternity leave benefits.
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
This paper evaluates the effects of maternal vs. alternative care providers time inputs on children s cognitive development using the sample of single mothers in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. To deal with the selection problem created by unobserved heterogeneity of mothers and children, we develop a model of mother s employment and child-care decisions. Guided by this model, we obtain approximate decisions rules for employment and child care use, and estimate these jointly with the child s cognitive ability production function, an approach we refer to as quasi-structural. This joint estimation implements a selection correction.
To help identify our selection model, we take advantage of the substantial and plausibly exogenous variation in employment and child-care choices of single mothers generated by the variation in welfare rules across states and over time, especially, the large changes created by the 1996 welfare reform legislation and earlier State waivers. Welfare rules provide natural exclusion restrictions, as it is plausible they enter decision rules for employment and day care use, while not entering the child cognitive ability production function directly.
Our results imply that if a mother works full-time, while placing a child in day care, for one full year, it reduces the child s cognitive ability test score by roughly 2.7 percent on average, which is 0.14 standard deviations of the score distribution. However, we find evidence of substantial observed and unobserved heterogeneity in the day care effect. Negative effects of day care on test scores are larger for better-educated mothers and for children with larger skill endowments.
31/10/2008
Forthcoming International Economic Review.
This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of employment and child care decisions of women after childbirth in order to evaluate the effects of maternal employment and daycare choices on children s cognitive ability. We use data from the NLSY to estimate the model. Results indicate that the effects of maternal employment and child care on children s ability are negative and rather sizable. In fact, having a full-time working mother who uses child care during one of the first five years after childbirth is associated with a 1.8 percent reduction in the child s test scores. Based on the estimates of the model, we assess the impact of policies related to parental leave, child care and other incentives to stay at home after childbirth on women s decisions and children s outcomes.
31/10/2008
In this paper, we study the extent and nature of 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.
Trabajo Infantil en Colombia18/10/2007
This paper studies the magnitude and nature of child labor in Colombia. In particular, we evaluate the factors that determine joint child labor and school attendance decisions within the household. In addition, we study the characteristics of children, parents and households that are associated with certain types of child labor, e.g., work with relatives vs. work with non-relatives and work in certain economic sectors. Total child labor participation, which includes all working children from 5 to 17 years of age, was approximately 14.5 percent in 2001. Approximately two thirds of this group also attended school. Child labor participation rates in rural areas were twice as big as those in urban areas. Around two thirds of working children worked for their parents or other relatives. The majority of children work in the agriculture sector (approximately 38 percent) followed by retail, manufacturing and services.
We estimate a model in which child labor and school attendance are simultaneous decisions. Higher educational attainment of the head of the household, older head of household and higher adult employment rates within the household are positively and significantly associated with higher probabilities of child labor. In addition, the probability that a child works increases for those in the lowest income quintile, for children living in larger households and living with extended family. In sum, we find evidence of two different types of child laborers: child employment with relatives in family owned businesses predominant among less disadvantaged children, which complements adult labor and is usually accompanied with school attendance; and child employment with non-relatives which is not usually accompanied with school attendance, is associated with poorer households and tends to substitute adult labor. Finally, we find robust evidence that a conditional cash transfer program, Familias en Accion, has had significant effects on child labor, especially in the case of boys.
26/02/2009
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.
26/02/2009
Web appendices to accompany "Child Care Choices and Children's Cognitive Achievement: The Case of Single Mothers".
Child Adoption in the United States: Historical Trends and the Determinants of Adoption Demand and Supply, 1951-2000with Luojia Hu, Chiaki Moriguchi, Eva Nagypal.
Marriage vs. Cohabitation: The Effects on Children's Well-being (Under review)The distribution of the Colombian population according to marital status has changed dramatically during the past decades, and this has happened in different ways across the income distribution. When in marital unions, people in lower income groups tend to prefer cohabitation over marriage more often than people in the upper part of the income distribution. If differences in well-being exist between married and cohabiting households, these trends have potentially adverse feedback effects on the income distribution. In this paper we evaluate whether there are, in fact, differences in adult and child outcomes between cohabiting and married households, once differences in demographics and other observable characteristics are controlled for, and possible endogeneity biases due to selection issues are taken into account. We find that cohabiting households are in fact worse-off in various dimensions including home ownership, ownership of durable goods, earnings, and child outcomes such as schooling and cognitive and non-cognitive tests. In addition, we attempt to understand the reason why these differences arise and find evidence that cohabiting households exhibit less stable and forward looking behaviors and are characterized by less income sharing and specialization within the household.
