This article examines the impact of denying a wanted abortion on women and children in Colombia using high-quality administrative microdata and credibly exogenous variation in abortion access. Women can seek legal abortions through a tutela, with cases randomly assigned to judges. Female judges are 20 percentage points (32%) less likely to deny abortion cases than are male judges, and we use the judge’s sex as an instrument for abortion denial. Denial of a wanted abortion has both immediate and lasting effects. It increases a woman’s risk of death by 2.5 percentage points within nine months, mainly due to unsafe abortion procedures, and raises the likelihood of carrying the pregnancy to term by 31 percentage points. Tracking outcomes up to 15 years later, we find that women denied an abortion experience more health issues, lower educational attainment, reduced labor force participation, and higher rates of single motherhood, poverty, and reliance on government assistance. Existing children, born before their mother sought an abortion, are less likely to attend school and are more likely to work.

We study behavioural responses to personal wealth taxes in Colombia. We utilise tax microdata from 1993 to 2016 linked with the leaked Panama Papers to investigate offshoring to the country’s key tax havens. We leverage variation from discrete jumps in tax liability and four major reforms to the wealth tax system, including changes in tax rates and duration, using bunching and difference-in-difference techniques. We find compelling evidence that taxpayers instantly reduce the wealth they declare in response to a wealth tax. Moreover, these effects can persist for years even after the wealth tax is no longer in place, providing the first evidence of a hysteresis effect for a temporary tax policy. The response is driven by misreporting items that authorities cannot cross-verify, such as overstating debt and understating non-third-party-reported business assets. Additionally, the wealthiest taxpayers respond to wealth tax increases by hiding assets in hard-to-track entities in tax havens.

We study the impact of money on households during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, Colombia rolled out a new unconditional cash transfer (UCT) to 1 million households in poverty worth US$19 (PPP US$55.6) and paid every five to eight weeks. Using a randomized control trial and linked administrative and survey data, we find the UCT had positive (albeit modest) effects on measures of household well-being (e.g., financial health, food access). Moreover, the UCT boosted support for emergency assistance to households and firms during the crisis and promoted social cooperation. Finally, we explore the bottlenecks in expanding mobile money during a pandemic.