My main area of research is macroeconomics and labour economics. In particular, I am interested in family, demography, and quantitative macroeconomics.
The Sex Ratio, Marriage and Bargaining: A Look at China
Revision requested, Review of Economic Dynamics
I study married people's time allocation decisions under an unbalanced sex ratio, to answer whether bargaining between spouses should be accounted for (e.g. the collective model of the household) or not (unitary model). I document a substantial increase in the leisure ratio between married women and men in China from 1990 to 2010, calibrate a model of marriage, bargaining and marital sorting to the baseline year, and compare the predictions of a collective and unitary versions in 2010. In the former the leisure ratio does increase, but not in the latter. Via a decomposition exercise I find that the sex ratio accounts for about four hours of extra leisure per week for married women, driven by a decrease in paid work. The effect on married men is of the same magnitude and opposite sign. My results suggest that accounting for bargaining seems to be crucial to explain the sex-specific impact of changes that affect differently men and women.
Many developed countries are at risk of experiencing population decline due to low fertility rates, with potential adverse economic effects. As a response, governments are deploying family policies to increase the number of children. In this paper, we propose a dynamic life-cycle model of fertility and female labour force participation to assess their effectiveness. We use the short-run fertility effects of a cash transfer policy from Spain to calibrate its parameters. Using the calibrated model, we find that the impacts in the long run are half as large as in the short run. This is driven by differences in the responses of younger and older women at the time of implementation. The latter must react shortly after, as they cannot delay fertility much longer. The former anticipate their first birth. This generates additional births in the short run. We also study the effects of an alternative policy consisting of childcare subsidisation, and explore how the coexistence of temporary and permanent contracts in Spain, which have different earnings profiles, affects fertility and interacts with cash transfers, by raising the costs of career interruptions in crucial child-bearing years.
Why do agents consume more services relative to goods as income grows? We present a theory of structural change assuming that a representative household satisfies final needs by means of two home-production functions in time and either goods or services from the market. When calibrating the model to U.S. data, roughly half of structural change is accounted for by technological change allowing services to display a larger time saving than goods in satisfying final needs. Also, even if preferences are homothetic, the calibrated model generates endogenous income effects, which account for the remaining structural change generated by the model.
Urban population growth has occurred without much structural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa: shares of employment in agriculture remain high, even in cities. Moreover, informal settlements or slums have emerged and persisted over time in the growing metropoles. This project aims to link these features of low-income country urbanisation with a dynamic spatial growth model. The expansion of the modern manufacturing and services sectors depends on the relative strength of two forces: urban congestion in the city core amplified by the slums (which is the only location in which modern economic activities may take place), and agglomeration economies created by the growing city. This framework has the potential to allow us to quantify the optimal urbanisation rate for low-income countries, and contribute to answer the question of whether they are urbanising too fast or not fast enough.
Family Policies and Social Security with Lidia Cruces
