Documents González, Libertad 7 results

"Countries often encourage part-time work among new parents as part of their family policies, aiming to foster mothers' labor market attachment. However, this approach may unintentionally impede women's long-term career prospects. We examine the impact of a 1999 Spanish reform that allowed parents to reduce their working hours by up to a half while their youngest child was under age 6, along with job protection measures. Leveraging eligibility rules, we follow a regression kink design, comparing ineligible women to mothers who had varying lengths of eligibility, and tracking their subsequent work trajectories. Our findings show that longer eligibility led to a modest increase in maternal part-time work during her child's early years, with mothers working approximately one additional day part-time for each extra month of eligibility. This increase in part-time work substituted for days spent in unemployment rather than reducing full-time work, leading to a rise in earnings. In the long term, extended eligibility also led to improvements in both employment and earnings. Overall, we find that the policy had a positive impact on the labor supply and earnings of women with children, both in the short and long term."

"Western countries differ greatly in the extent to which single mothers participate in the labour market. Using LIS data for 15 countries, I propose and estimate a simple structural model of labour supply that incorporates the main variables that influence the work decision for single mothers. The results suggest that a large part of the cross-country variation in the employment rates of single mothers can be explained by their different demographic characteristics and by the variation in expected income in the in-work versus out-of-work states. Women with higher expected earnings are more likely to work. Higher in-work benefits encourage employment. Single mothers with higher income from other sources, including child support, are less likely to work. Even after demographic and income variables are controlled for, the country dummies remain significant. This indicates that other variables not explicitly incorporated in the model, such as child care arrangements or social and cultural backgrounds, may also play a relevant role."

"This paper uses data from the eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (1994–2001) to estimate the impact of welfare benefits on the incidence of single motherhood and headship among young women across European countries. The regressions include country fixed effects as well as time trends that are allowed to vary by country, to account for fixed and trending unmeasured factors that could influence both benefit levels and family formation. The analysis also accounts for individual characteristics and labor market conditions. The results suggest that benefit levels have a small but significant positive effect on the prevalence of single mothers. An increase in yearly benefits of 1000 euros is estimated to increase the incidence of single mother families by about 2 percent."

"This paper analyses the effect of a reform in the French single parents allowance on the labor supply of single mothers with very young children. The reform aimed at encouraging participation by allowing eligible single parents to accumulate welfare benefits and labor earnings for a limited period of time. The analysis shows that eligible single mothers were significantly more likely to work after the reform. During the same period, the employment rate of married mothers with young children did not experience a significant change, suggesting that at least part of the increase among single mothers was a consequence of the reform."

"We study the labor market effects of the large immigration wave in Spain between 2001 and 2006. In this period the foreign-born share increased from 6% to 13%, with a total inflow exceeding three million immigrants. Our analysis exploits the large variation in the size of immigration flows across Spain's regions. To identify causal effects, we take advantage of the fact that immigrants' location choices were strongly driven by early migrant settlements that arrived during the 1980s. We find that the relatively unskilled migration inflows did not affect the wages or employment rates of unskilled workers in the receiving regions. The growth of the unskilled labor force was absorbed mostly through increases in total employment. This increase did not originate in changes in the composition of regional output, but was instead driven by changes in skill intensity at the industry level. Regions that received a large inflow of unskilled immigrants increased the intensity of use of the now more abundant (unskilled) labor, relative to other regions. The key industries responsible for this absorption were retail, construction, hotels and restaurants and domestic services. These results are inconsistent with standard open economy models but are in line with recent empirical studies for the United States and Germany."

"We evaluate the effect of a 2003 reform in the Spanish income tax on fertility and the employment of mothers with small children. The reform introduced a tax credit for working mothers with children under the age of three, while also increasing child deductions for all households with children. Theoretically, given the interplay of these two components, the expected effect of the reform is ambiguous on both outcomes. We find that the combined reforms significantly increased both fertility (by almost 5%) and the employment rate of mothers with children under three (by 2%). These effects were more pronounced among less-educated women. In addition, to disentangle the impact of the two reform components, we use an earlier reform that increased child deductions in 1999. We find that the child deductions affect mothers' employment negatively, which implies that the 2003 tax credit would have increased employment even more (up to 5%) in the absence of the change in child deductions."

"The covid-19 pandemic led many countries to close schools and declare lockdowns during the Spring of 2020, with important impacts on the labor market. We document the effects of the covid-19 lockdown in Spain, which was hit early and hard by the pandemic and suffered one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe. We collected rich household survey data in early May of 2020. We document large employment losses during the lockdown, especially in "quarantined" sectors and non-essential sectors that do not allow for remote work. Employment losses were mostly temporary, and hit lower-educated workers particularly hard. Women were slightly more likely to lose their job than men, and those who remained employed were more likely to work from home. The lockdown led to a large increase in childcare and housework, given the closing of schools and the inability to outsource. We find that men increased their participation in housework and childcare slightly, but most of the burden fell on women, who were already doing most of the housework before the lockdown. Overall, we find that the covid-19 crisis appears to have increased gender inequalities in both paid and unpaid work in the short-term."