Research
Working Papers
The Effects of Child Care Provision in Mexico (Job Market Paper)
In 2007, seeking to increase female labor force participation and more generally ease burdens on working women, the Mexican government introduced one of the most ambitious child care programs in an emerging economy: Estancias Infantiles para Apoyar a Madres Trabajadoras (EI). EI covers 90% of the cost of enrolling a child under the age of four at a formal child care center. The program is intended to benefit women who are looking for work, in school, or working� with the exception of those who already have access to child care because their job is covered by Mexico�s social security system (IMSS). The roll-out of EI was so aggressive that by 2010 it enrolled 340,000 participants, more than double that of the 25-year-old IMSS child care program. However, EI was also rolled-out unevenly, owing to idiosyncratic variation in how quickly local offices processed applications from child care centers. I exploit the variation in the program�s availability across time, across municipalities, and between eligible families and very similar ineligible ones. The essence of my approach is difference-in-difference-in-differences, but I extend this method in several ways--most importantly by adapting the Synthetic Control Method to my repeated cross-section data so that the ineligible comparison group is highly credible. Most of my results are intention-to-treat effects but I also show pseudo-treatment-on-the-treated effects in which I assume that all the effects flow through families in which EI-eligible women significantly reduced how many hours they spent caring for their own children. I find that EI increased women�s probability of working and reduced the time they devoted to child rearing. EI caused women to obtain more stable jobs, and it increased their labor incomes. EI also had effects�probably unintended�on men. Affected husbands spent less time on child rearing and housework, and they were more likely to switch to a better-paid job. However, husbands of EI-eligible women who were initially unemployed were less likely to re-enter the labor force.
Business Literacy and Development: Lessons from a Randomized Field Experiment (with Giacomo De Giorgi and Jesse Cunha)
Women in developing countries often earn income through small enterprises such as making and selling food and craft items or re-selling wholesale goods. Several previous studies have established that women's returns in these enterprises are low, often lower than those of male-run small enterprises in the same area. One possible explanation for this finding is that women have especially deficient training in basic business skills. Working with an NGO, we devised a randomized controlled trial in which female entrepreneurs were given 48 hours of training, over six weeks, on topics such as measuring costs, setting prices, maximizing profits, marketing, and handling the legal issues that arise in a small business. Seven months after the completion of training, we find that the female entrepreneurs who were randomly assigned to treatment earn higher profits, have larger revenues, and serve a greater number of clients. We also find that they are more likely to use formal accounting techniques and know how profitable they are.
Why Do Women Become Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries? A Story of Negative Selection
In highly developed economies, women who are employed are disproportionately unlikely to be self-employed entrepreneurs, compared to men with similar measured skills. In developing countries, the opposite is true. Working women are very often entrepreneurs, but their returns are low. In this paper, I show that selection into entrepreneurship is negative in Mexico. It appears to be largely a response to local unemployment and other variables that indicate that local labor demand is deficient. This suggests that when jobs are rationed, they are disproportionately allocated to men in Mexico. I show that negative selection helps to explain why female entrepreneurs in Mexico earn lower returns to capital than do male entrepreneurs.
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