The Effects of Family Gender Roles on Educational Attainment and Career Choice of Girls
with Carmen Vargas
It is vastly documented how parents’ attitudes toward gender norms affect their children’s identity, preferences, and human capital accumulation. Recent literature for Denmark, Sweden and the US finds evidence that first-born girls, conditionally on being in a family with at least two children, have a penalty in their adult-life earnings when the second-born child is a boy instead of a girl. This would be explained by girls having larger conformity to gender norms when they have a brother, shaping their preferences for more traditionally feminine careers, even though it does not make a difference in their educational attainment. I intend to exploit this identification to explore the educational attainment and career choice of first-born girls in Peru, a developing country. I would also explore attitudes toward gender norms and time use of families of such composition using social and time use surveys. The main hypothesis is that I would find negative effects in educational attainment, unlike the case in the developed countries. In my setting, girls who face stronger conformity to gender norms in their families will have less time and access to educational resources.
Gone with the Crisis? Job Automation during the Covid-19 Pandemic
with Eric Parrado and Miguel Benítez
We test the hypothesis for the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating the automation of some jobs, leading people to change industries and occupations in Peru and the US. For that, we linked four-digit job occupation codes to different measures of job automation recently developed in the literature. We also link four-digit job industry codes to government identification of essential and non-essential industries, distinguishing industries most and least affected by restrictions to operate due to COVID-19. We exploit the identification above and build a triple difference model to estimate occupation mobility responses to COVID-19. We find that workers at high-automation risk in industries most affected by lockdowns were more prompt to lose their jobs during and after the crisis. We use panel data from the National Household Survey (ENAHO) in Peru and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) in the US.
Presented at the 2018 Annual Congress of the Peruvian Economic Association
This paper studies how the practice carried out by some schools of sorting students among classrooms based on their shown academic performance and other characteristics (gender and ethnicity) affects student outcomes and intensifies educational gaps. This practice is identified through non-parametric tests that indicate systematic differences between classrooms and through school’s self-report by principals. A hierarchical linear model is used to identify the effects of the practice at the school level and the effects of the environment at the classroom level on Student Census Evaluation results. The results suggest that the practice of sorting negatively affects the results of students in less advantaged classrooms and positively affects students in advantaged classrooms; the overall result being negative. However, it is not possible to affirm that the practice widens educational inequalities for women and students with a non-Hispanic mother tongue.
New York became the 15th state to legalize marijuana for recreational use in 2021. With a growing share of the country legalizing cannabis, researchers and policymakers have studied the effects of its legalization on the economic and social characteristics of the states that have legalized marijuana. This analysis adds to the existing literature by exploring the implications of marijuana legalization for recreational use in New York State. Specifically, we analyze the impact of marijuana legalization on crime rates in New York City. We leverage New York Police Data and run a Two-Way Fixed Effects Difference-in-Differences model to estimate how crime rates changed after the passage of the law. We find that legalization is associated with an increase in the number of arrests for some, but not all, violent crimes in precincts where marijuana arrests were high prior to the passing of the law. The increase in crime could be related to a reallocation of police resources to other crimes, but further analysis is necessary.