Research
Working Papers:
Informality, children and female occupational choice (Job Market Paper)
This paper studies how childbirth reshapes women’s occupational choices in a developing country with imperfect enforcement. Using Brazilian PNAD-C data, I show that childbirth lowers women’s labor force participation and, among those who remain employed, raises transitions into informal entrepreneurship by 8 percentage points. The effect is concentrated among non-college women. To interpret these patterns, I develop and calibrate a life-cycle occupational choice model with exogenous fertility, heterogeneity in wage and managerial ability, spousal earnings, and child-related time and monetary costs. Formal wage employment is constrained by stochastic access to formal jobs and limited access to part-time contracts. The model reproduces the post-birth shift from formal wage work to informal entrepreneurship. Counterfactuals show that lowering monetary childcare costs mainly raises participation, whereas lowering time costs shifts mothers toward formal wage work; expanding part-time options has limited effects when formal-job access is unchanged.
Entrepreneurial Human Capital and Firm Informality with Luis Franjo, Francesco Turino Slides Paper (Submitted)
This paper studies how entrepreneurial human capital affects firm informality in developing economies. We develop a life-cycle general equilibrium model with endogenous education and occupational choice under limited tax enforcement and credit frictions. Entrepreneurial ability is enhanced by college education. Calibrated to Brazil, the model shows that expanding college attainment reduces informality by reallocating talent toward larger, more productive formal firms. This raises GDP and aggregate productivity, with the magnitude of effects depending on the degree of credit frictions. We validate the mechanism using microdata, leveraging Brazil’s 1996 education reform. The findings underscore the role of education in promoting formalization.
Adolescent Fertility, Human Capital, and Public Finances with Luis Franjo, Nicolas Roig (Work in Progress)