Three essays about migration, gender and family economic
This thesis consists of three essays about migration, gender, and family economics, within the framework of applied economics and with a special focus on a developing country. The first essay of my thesis contributes to the literature on fiscal policies and intergenerational transfers. The second es...
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| Format: | doctoralThesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/32490 |
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| Summary: | This thesis consists of three essays about migration, gender, and family economics, within the framework of applied economics and with a special focus on a developing country. The first essay of my thesis contributes to the literature on fiscal policies and intergenerational transfers. The second essay contributes to the literature on the effects of children’s sex composition on parental behavior and how it may affect children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development. The third essay contributes to the literature on gender and family economics. The first chapter, co-authored with Rómulo A. Chumacero, develops a business cycle model of a small open economy with heterogeneous agents and international labor mobility, with a particular focus on taxes and transfer policies. Migration occurs as a result of the maximization problem of families and, combined with remittances, makes consumption smoothing possible. This paper shows how transfers from the government to young people and elders, funded with distortionary taxes, prompt the migration of people of working age and, among them, some of the most skilled members of the economy. The model is calibrated to match labor mobility in various age-skill groups and aggregate cycle dynamics of the Uruguayan economy, including government transfers and migration volatility. The second chapter investigates how the gender of the second-born sibling affects first- born cognitive and non-cognitive development and their parental treatment when children are on average 52 months (and not older than 66 months) in Uruguay. Since the study looks at children at a very early age, sibling-to-sibling influences are unlikely to play a role and hence an opportunity to isolate effects that arise purely via parental treatment. The identification strategy overcomes parental preferences’ bias of children’s sex composition due to the randomness of the sex of the second-born child. Results show that first-born boys who have a same-sex younger sibling have lower levels of motor skills and non-cognitive development. In contrast, first-born girls are not affected by having a younger sister or brother. The main drivers of the differences between first-born boys and girls are the lower probability of boys living with both biological parents, less investment of parents in their quality time, and a reduced likelihood of attending preschool. The third chapter analyzes the impact of intra-household bargaining on the labor supply of heterosexual couples with different divisions of domestic work. The objective is to compare the decision-making process in families with egalitarian, traditional, and non-traditional gender role attitudes towards the division of domestic work. Data from Uruguay shows that couples of all types are sensitive to bargaining power shifts, as measured by the non-labor income difference between cohabiting partners and married couples. Results suggest that a relatively rich male has more bargaining power and supplies less labor, and the opposite is true for his partner. In addition, being married reduces the labor supply of women and increases that of men in egalitarian households. These results are robust to selection into employment correction. Finally, less gender-normative households assign a larger share of non-labor income to women after the negotiation process. |
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