Bernal Raquel - Publicaciones

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

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.

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

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.

Quasi-structural Estimation of a Model of Child Care Choices and Child Cognitive Ability Production” (with Michael Keane). Forthcoming Journal of Econometrics, 2009
31/10/2008

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.