Working Papers
With María Adelaida Martínez
In recent years, millions of children have been displaced, and evidence informing public policy for the welfare of migrants and recipient communities will be critical in the coming years. In this paper, we leverage cross-grade within-school variation on migrant share to understand the effect of the sudden influx of Venezuelan migrant children into the Peruvian school system. Our estimates show that as Venezuelan migrants enter Peruvian schools, parents of incumbent students react by transferring their children to higher-quality schools with fewer migrants. A ten-percentage-point increase in migrant exposure increases the probability of switching by 1.5 percentage points in primary and 1.1 percentage points in secondary schools. To understand the implications of this native flight on academic achievement, we employ a structural model that identifies students who switch schools because of migrants and compare their outcomes in the presence of migrants to a counterfactual scenario without migrants. Our findings reveal that switchers experience small gains (close to zero), albeit at a higher tuition cost, while students left behind are not negatively impacted. This suggests that native flight can serve as an adaptive strategy only for some students to mitigate the effects of the migrant influx, but generally brings no gains to students who switch schools. Moreover, it comes at a high cost.
With Leah Lakdawala and Diego Vera-Cossio
One out of two working children worldwide works in hazardous conditions. We study the effects of a law that introduced benefits and protections for child workers and temporarily lowered the de facto legal working age from 14 to 10 in Bolivia. We employ a difference-in-discontinuity approach that exploits the variation in the law's application to different age groups. Work decreased for children under 14, whose work was newly legalized and regulated under the law, particularly in areas with a higher threat of inspections. The effects disappear after the law is reversed. We do not find evidence of improvements in work safety. Thus, the effects do not appear to be driven by increased hiring costs to ensure worker safety. Instead, the effects appear to be driven by a reduction in the most visible forms of child work, suggesting that firms and parents (households) may have reduced employment of young children to minimize the risk of being subject to legal and social sanctions.
Gender and Transitions into Adulthood
With Craig McIntosh and Andrew Zeitlin
In this study, we evaluate how alternative programs to improve the employment and productive potential of underemployed Rwandan youth affect young women’s and men's transitions to adulthood. We use data from McIntosh and Zeitlin (2019), who conducted a randomized controlled trial with 1,848 youth and compare a package of training, soft skills, and networking interventions to cash transfers and to a control group. The two programs alleviate a different set of constraints that youth face in the labor market: cash transfers relax the economic constraints, and the training program tackles the constraint of lack of skills. Among women, we find that more educated women use cash to start businesses. For men, however, the less educated men go into entrepreneurship.