Research
Job Market Paper
Municipal-level Gender Norms: Measurement and Effects on Women in Politics [PDF]
with Lorenzo de Masi (Carlos III University of Madrid)
Abstract: We study the implications of traditional gender norms for legislators' engagement with women's issues. We leverage rich data from Facebook on the popularity of gender-related interests (processed using machine learning algorithms) to develop a granular Gender Norms Index (GNI) at the municipal level within Italy, a geographical resolution that would otherwise be unavailable. After validating our index, we leverage this local variation in norms to isolate their impact on legislators' policy activity in the Italian Parliament. We show that while female legislators generally sponsor more gender-related bills than their male counterparts, their engagement is substantially smaller if they were born in a gender-conservative town. This result persists even when comparing legislators within the same party, constituency or with similar characteristics. The absence of such a systematic impact on non-gender legislation further reinforces the causal interpretation of our estimates. Supplementary evidence on voting behavior suggests that gender norms also affect the passage of pro-equality legislation. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social norms and sexist culture in lawmaking, thereby slowing down reform for the expansion of women's rights.
Working Papers
The Effectiveness of Parental Leaves when Social Norms Matter [PDF]
Awarded the Best paper award (third prize) at the Augustin Cournot Doctoral Days 2021
Abstract: Do gender norms affect the impact of parental leave policies? I show how, in presence of conservative norms, leave policies may fail to foster gender convergence, and possibly be counterproductive for it. I consider a model where mothers' career and couples' childcare decisions are affected by endogenous norms regarding maternal care. Adhering to conservative gender norms, mothers caring for their infants impose a negative externality on other mothers. The introduction of parental leave expands the utility-possibility frontier, and more mothers pursue high-level careers. However, both because of conservative norms and the reduced opportunity cost of care, they take inefficiently long leaves, thus reinforcing conservative gender roles. I show that fathers' quotas that reserve a fraction of the leave for fathers can restore efficiency. Intuitively, when parents share leave, mothers take shorter leaves, thus reducing norm costs suffered by other mothers. Hence, in gender conservative contexts, policies aiming to increase fathers' involvement in care are desirable not only for gender equity, but also on efficiency grounds. In a second step, I test my model's key predictions in the Italian context. I confirm that when they share leave with fathers, mothers take shorter leaves. Furthermore, mothers' education significantly decreases their likelihood of taking long leaves in areas with more neutral norms, but not in more traditional ones, confirming the importance of norms in leave uptake.
A Welfare Analysis of Universal Childcare: Lessons From a Canadian Reform [PDF]
with Sébastien Montpetit (Toulouse School of Economics) and Pierre-Loup Beauregard (University of British Columbia)
Abstract: While recent research shows that targeted early-childhood interventions can yield large returns, the extent to which such benefits extend to universal programs remains an open question. Leveraging the introduction of universal low-fee daycare in Québec in 1997, this paper evaluates the welfare effect of universal childcare provision. First, using novel data on daycare coverage rates within Québec and a difference-in-differences design, we show that the positive impacts on maternal labor supply and childcare use are larger in areas where daycare expanded more. Thus, childcare availability, rather than just the price decrease, is responsible for the observed behavioral responses. In the second part of the paper, we estimate the benefit-to-net-cost ratio of the policy. We estimate mothers' utility gains using a model of maternal labor supply and childcare choices, incorporating non-pecuniary benefits for parents, such as non-monetary costs of childcare use, and childcare availability. Structural estimates indicate benefits of more than 3.5 dollars per dollar of net government spending—more than twice that obtained when using earnings gains as a sufficient statistic. As such, our findings suggest that sufficient-statistic estimators applied to non-marginal reforms may overlook key welfare gains. Counterfactual simulations suggest that channelling more resources towards opening spots, rather than lowering prices, could lead to even larger social returns.
Work in Progress
Gender Norms and Parental Leave: Evidence from Municipal-Level Facebook Data
with Lorenzo de Masi (Carlos III University of Madrid)
Selected project for VisitINPS Fellowship on gender inequalities
Abstract: In this paper, we empirically examine the role of gender norms in parental leave decisions. To this end, we leverage our Gender Norms Index (GNI) measuring municipal-level gender attitudes in Italy based on data from Facebook. Intuitively, our methodology generates variation in attitudes within narrowly defined geographical areas, thus allowing to compare individuals facing the same institutional and labor market environments. Additionally, rich administrative data enable to control for several worker and firm characteristics that affect individual participation to leave programs. We expect to find that living in more gender conservative areas induces female (male) workers to ask for relatively longer (shorter) leaves. We then ask whether such an effect is stronger for women at the top of the wage distribution, since taking a greater share of leave might help them alleviate their sense of ‘guilt’ for having a career. Because the loss of work experience is particularly costly for them, long periods of leave may ultimately lead to large career costs. As a result, rather than facilitating gender convergence in the labor market, standard leave entitlements might in fact backfire, when interacting with slow-moving gendered norms.
The Perverse Effects of Rent Control: Evidence From a Large-scale Stringent Regulation in Catalonia
with Michael Abel (ESCP) and Jaime Luque (ESCP)
Abstract: Using a stringent large-scale policy intervention that capped rental prices in more than 60 municipalities in Catalonia, Spain, we find that rent control initially reduces average rents, but this effect vanishes after one year due to a 30%-32% decline in rental housing supply. House sales increase by 13%-18% while house prices decrease by 2.3%-3.7%. The reduction in both rental and house prices stems from effects at the bottom of the respective distributions, with no significant effects on rents at the top. Conversely, expensive houses experience significant price increases. We estimate that working class properties lost 1 billion euros in value as a consequence of rent control, a significant larger amount than the 8 million euros gains from reduced rents for low- and medium-income tenants. Inequality also widened because house values at the top quartile of the distribution increased by almost 1.1 billion euros.