Knowledge that Transforms

Does access to free health insurance affect household labor supply decisions? We address this question by exploiting the 2002 introduction of universal health insurance in Mexico (Seguro Popular, SP) that broke the link between access to health care and job contract. Reducedform estimates show that SP increased informality among less educated families with children by 3.5%. We develop and estimate a household search model that incorporates the value of formal sector amenities relative to pre-reform alternatives, and the value of health insurance. Model estimates show that households value SP by, at most, 1.33 per unit of net cost.

Child support frequently increases with the noncustodial fathers' incomes. I study the effect on their work incentives. For identification, I exploit the end of child support when the children involved reach emancipation age. Empirically, child support paid drops to near zero on emancipation; fathers correspondingly increase their work hours and annual earnings. Formally, each 10 percentage point increase in the child support rate leads to an 8–11 percent decrease in labor supply conditional on working. I find weaker extensive margin responses. In a structural model, I map these estimates to the intertemporal elasticity of labor supply (Frisch elasticity).

International audience

In the Netherlands, an immediate baby boom followed the end of WWII and the baby bust of the 1930s. I propose a novel application of the bunching methodology to examine whether the war shifted the timing of fertility or changed women's completed fertility. I disaggregate the number of births by age for cohorts of mothers, and estimate counterfactual distributions of births by exploiting that women experienced the war at different ages. I show that the rise in fertility after the liberation did not make up for the "missed" births that did not occur prior to the war, as fertility would have been 9.4% higher in absence of WWII.

How do short absences from work affect workers’ labor trajectory? We use linked employer-employee administrative data from Hungary, with rich administrative health records, and use unexpected and mild accidents with no permanent labor productivity losses as exogenous drivers of short absences. Our Differencein-Differences results show that, relative to the counterfactual of no accident, even short (3–6-months long) periods of absence due to accidents decrease wages for up to two years by 1.5 percent, and workers end up with lower-paying firms. Missed opportunities to move to higher-paying firms account for 7–37 percent of the wage loss over a two-year period.