Research

Job Market Paper

Cash transfers and women's labour supply: evidence from the world's largest programme

Best Job Market Paper Award 2024 - European Economic Association & UniCredit Foundation

Abstract:  Women's participation in the labour force has been a powerful driver of economic growth, lifting millions out of poverty. Today, cash transfer programmes have come to dominate government efforts to reduce poverty.  Whilst effective at providing short-term relief, these programmes may also undermine long-term poverty reduction by disincentivising labour supply. To study whether cash transfers enhance or depress labour supply, I measure the effect of an exogenous increase in Brazil's main cash transfer on the labour supply of men and women. I find no effect for men while, contrary to standard incentive effects, women increase their labour supply by 7.6% over two years. This is driven by mothers, for whom the transfer relaxes childcare constraints, enabling them to join the labour force. Leveraging discontinuities on the allocation of education funds to Brazil's 5570 municipalities, I find that the effect is stronger in areas receiving more education funds. Overall, my paper illustrates that there is no trade-off between short-term relief and long-term poverty reduction. Rather, cash transfers encourage women’s labour force participation, particularly when complementary public goods, such as educational facilities, are available.

Presentations (including scheduled): UCL/STICERD/IFS Development Work in Progress (IFS), IMDS Brown Bag (Rio de Janeiro), EWMES 2024 (Palma), STEG Annual Conference 2025 (Oxford), UNU-WIDER Development Conference 2025 (Helsinki), MAP Peru (online)

Coverage: Economics That Really Matters, BBC Brasil (in Portuguese)

Working Paper

Does Conservation Work in General Equilibrium? - with Veronica Salazar Restrepo (LSE)

Abstract:  Deforestation and the subsequent use of deforested land for agricultural activities account for roughly 20% of the global CO2-equivalent emissions in the past two decades. Despite the global scope of the consequences of deforestation, public policies and private initiatives to reduce deforestation are often spatially targeted: they intensify environmental protection in specific ecosystems, making agricultural land scarcer. While potentially effective at a local level, their global effectiveness may be attenuated in general equilibrium, due to resulting increases in the demand for agricultural land in non-targeted areas, i.e. deforestation leakage. To quantify leakage, build a quantitative spatial equilibrium model of the Brazilian economy where agricultural land is the output of a costly process of deforestation, firms produce goods that are differentially land-demanding, and there is costly trade and migration. Our main findings are that (i) targeting the regions with highest deforestation levels can be an effective tool to curb aggregate deforestation in Brazil, and (ii) leakage increases significantly when considering a longer time-horizon. After one year, 2-3% of the deforestation reductions are outdone by leakage. Simulating the model forward for 10 years, this number goes up to 10%. The relatively small leakage is driven by agricultural intensification, including more crop farming, increased worker and cattle density per pasture, and shifts of production towards more productive regions.

Publication

The Child Penalty Atlas - with Camille Landais (LSE) and Henrik Kleven (Princeton)

Forthcoming at The Review of Economic Studies

Abstract:  This paper builds a world atlas of child penalties in employment based on micro data from 134 countries. The estimation of child penalties is based on pseudo-event studies of first child birth using cross-sectional data. The pseudo-event studies are validated against true event studies using panel data for a subset of countries. Most countries display clear and sizable child penalties: men and women follow parallel trends before parenthood, but diverge sharply and persistently after parenthood. While this pattern is pervasive, there is enormous variation in the magnitude of the effects across different regions of the world. The fraction of gender inequality explained by child penalties varies systematically with economic development and proxies for structural transformation. At low levels of development, child penalties represent a minuscule fraction of gender inequality. But as economies develop — incomes rise and the labour market transitions from subsistence agriculture to salaried work in industry and services— child penalties take over as the dominant driver of gender inequality. The relationship between child penalties and development is validated using historical data from current high-income countries, back to the 1700s for some countries. Finally, because parenthood is often tied to marriage, we also investigate the existence of marriage penalties in female employment. In general, women experience both marriage and child penalties, but their relative importance depends on the level of development. The development process is associated with a substitution from marriage penalties to child penalties, with the former gradually converging to zero.

Interactive Child Penalty Atlas Website: https://childpenaltyatlas.org/

Coverage: The Economist, The Economist (II), Financial Times, The New York Times, Fortune, VoxDev, NBER Digest, O Globo (in Portuguese), Valor Econômico (in Portuguese), Veja (in Portuguese), O Expresso (in Portuguese), Band (in Portuguese), El Mundo (in Spanish), Diario Financiero (in Spanish), PressPeru (in Spanish), Gestión (in Spanish), De Correspondent (in Dutch), FOCUS (in German), Il Sole 24 Ore, The Great Gender Divergence, The Intelligence (Podcast by The Economist), Independent, TRT World Roundtable

Research in Progress

• The Sustained Effects of Cash Transfers: Evidence from Brazil’s Bolsa Família - with Joana Naritomi (LSE) and Joana Silva (Católica Lisbon)

• Job Diversification and Economic Development - with Anton Heil (LSE)

• Impacts of at-scale public housing: evidence from cities in Brazil - with Bernardo Ribeiro (UBC)