Working papers
Motherhood and Violence (Job Market Paper)
Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) imposes large psychological and economic costs for women worldwide, and it is positively correlated with motherhood. This paper explores why. I propose a model and an empirical test for two alternative explanations which look observationally equivalent if we use usual IPV data. The first is that having a baby triggers men’s violent behavior; the second is that motherhood makes women more likely to stay with a violent partner. I use Mexican survey data with information on fertility, relationship history and violence history with current and past partners; this history allows me to disentangle the mechanisms. I find that motherhood is associated with a higher probability of current violence and a lower probability of leaving but I find no relationship between motherhood and men’s violent behavior. Evidence for this selection channel is further supported by exploiting the fertility shock induced by the opening of pharmacies, where I show that women are less likely to leave violent partners when they are mothers compared to when they are not. My results suggest that policies which strengthen women’s control over their fertility can reduce the incidence of IPV by enabling them to leave violent relationships before they are locked in by motherhood.
Property as a Driver of Violence: Evidence from Mexico
Draft available upon request.
This paper examines the effect of increasing homemakers' post-divorce property rights on intimate partner violence in the context of a developing country. Using a change in Mexican legislation that awarded homemakers up to 50% of marital assets, I analyze the short-term impact of increasing asset ownership on women home homicides at the municipality level. I find that the effect of the reform depends on the underlying unilateral divorce regulation. Increasing asset ownership in municipalities that require both spouses to agree to divorce has no effect on women home homicides. However, municipalities in states that adopted homemaker compensation reform and allowed for unilateral divorce had an increase in women home homicides of .08 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. This effect represents approximately one-ninth of a standard deviation of women home homicides in the data.
Work in progress
Structural Transformation and Children Time Use Allocation (With Ameek Singh)
In this paper, we study the relationship between children’s time use and economic development. Using harmonized data from 78 time-use surveys across 36 countries from 1974 to 2022, we analyze detailed information on household members’ time allocation, including children. To harmonize the various time classification systems, we developed a new framework that expands from three broad categories (work, education, and leisure) to 31 granular categories (e.g., cleaning and upkeep, sports and exercise, homework). Our findings reveal several important insights. First, girls spend considerably more time on household chores compared to boys from an early age. Second, as countries experience economic development, both boys and girls spend less time on household tasks, and the time gap between them narrows. Ongoing work aims to understand the relationship between the time use of other household members, particularly how mothers’ and daughters’ time use is interconnected.