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Browsing Working Papers by Department "Economics"
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Publication Bargaining under Threats: The Effect of Joint Custody Laws on Intimate Partner Violence(2021-09) Fernández Kranz, Daniel; Nollenberger, Natalia ; Roff, Jennifer; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75We study the effect of a policy change that exogenously shifted bargaining power from mothers to fathers on intimate partner violence. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment based on a series of reforms in Spain that shifted the custody decision from being unilaterally determined by the mother to a joint decision, barring evidence of violence. We find that the policy led to a large and significant decrease in intimate partner violence, with the largest effects among couples in which the mother was more likely to seek sole custody before the policy change.Publication Bargaining under Threats: The Effect of Joint Custody Laws on Intimate Partner Violence(IZA, 2020-10) Nollenberger, Natalia; Fernández Kranz, Daniel; Roff, Jennifer; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75We study the effect of a policy change that exogenously shifted bargaining power from mothers to fathers on intimate partner violence. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment based on a series of reforms in Spain that shifted the custody decision from being unilaterally determined by the mother to a joint decision, barring evidence of violence. We find that the policy increased the incidence of joint custody in Spain from less than 11% of all divorces to 40% in just five years. Comparing the evolution of intimate partner violence in treated and control regions and using couples without children as an additional comparison group, we find that the policy led to a large and significant decrease in intimate partner violence, with the largest effects among couples in which the mother was more likely to seek sole custody before the policy change. Consistent with this finding, the policy also led to a significant reduction in female partner homicides in treated regions. Finally, we also find evidence of more police reports by victims of intimate partner violence with a significantly higher proportion of these reports ending in dismissals or non-guilty decisions by the specialized courts. We interpret this finding as evidence of strategic behavior by mothers who want to retain sole custody of their children.Publication Commitments and the Marital Match: The Effect of Alimony Reform on Assortative Matching(IZA, 2021-11) Fernández Kranz, Daniel; Roff, Jennifer; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75This paper examines the effects of reforms that reduced alimony on matching in the marriage market. Recent literature indicates that divorce law changes which reduce commitment or income-sharing upon separation will lead to an increase in assortative matching, as women forgo specialization which may not be compensated upon divorce. Using state-level data on alimony reform that reduced the entitlements of eligible spouses and American Community Survey data on marriage and the characteristics of newlyweds, we find that alimony reform increased measures of spousal covariance in education. Our results indicate that correlation coefficients on spousal degree attainment consistently rise with alimony reform, and regression-based measures of assortative matching increase similarly. Moreover, we find the largest effects among those groups who might be more sensitive to the reform. Regression-based measures of assortative matching increase by over 10% among couples in which at least one partner had previously been married and by 9% among those couples who marry in states with less generous property division and child support which are often treated as substitutes for alimony in divorce settlementsPublication High Speed Internet and the Widening Gender Gap in Adolescent Mental Health: Evidence from Hospital Records(IZA, 2022-05) Fernández Kranz, Daniel; Nollenberger, Natalia; Arenas Arroyo, Esther; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75This paper studies the impact of internet access on adolescent’s mental health. Exploiting the exogenous variation in the deployment of optic fiber in different areas of Spain between 2007 and 2019, we find that high-speed internet (HSI) increased mental health diagnoses among girls. Exploring the mechanisms behind this effect, we show that HSI increases addictive internet use while reducing time spent on sleep, homework, and socializing with family and friends, with girls driving all these effects. We also provide evidence that HSI contributes to a significant increase in suicide among adolescents, with the effects again being larger among girls.Publication Income, Employment and Health Risks of Older Workers(Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros, 2022-07) Wei, Siqi; Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad; María de Maeztu Programme for Units of Excellence in R&D; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75This paper begins with the observation that many olderworkers move to "bridge" jobs with lower wages and fewer working hours before exiting the labor force for good. To explain this gradual transition to full retirement, I propose a nonlinear agingrelated shock — mismatch shock, which mismatches workers with their existing job and triggers job leaves. I develop an empirical framework of employment and job transitions jointly with stochastic wage and hour processes to separate health risks, individual-specific productivity risks, firm-specific mismatch risks, quality of outside offers, and job destruction risks faced by older workers. The model is estimated with a sample of male individuals aged 51 to 70 in the US Health and Retirement Study applying a novel parameter-expanded stochastic EM algorithm. The paper finds that mismatch shocks play an important role in explaining the reduction in wages and hours for movers. Furthermore, I calculate the welfare cost of risks and quantify how much individuals value the possibility of a flexible transition to full retirement by constructing a utility-based structural model of consumption, employment and job movements where agents face the same risks as in the empirical model. The model is estimated using a novel simulation-based algorithm that exploits the connection to the empirical model and the estimates from the empirical model. The results show that the median cost of mismatch risks amounts to a reduction in consumption flow by 5?3%-7?1% depending on the education group. Banning job changes and re-entry causes a welfare loss equivalent to a consumption drop of 12% 4%.Publication The Effect of Abortion Legalization on Fertility, Marriage and Long-Term Outcomes for Women(Barcelona School of Economics, 2021-10) Nollenberger, Natalia; González, Libertad; Jiménez Martín, Sergi; Vall Castello, Judit; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75We evaluate the short- and long-term effects for women of access to legal, subsidized abortion. We find evidence that the legalization of abortion in Spain in 1985 led to an immediate decrease in births, more pronounced for younger women in provinces with a higher supply of abortion services. Affected women were more likely to graduate from high school, less likely to marry young, less likely to divorce in the long-term, and reported higher life satisfaction as adults. We do not find negative effects on completed fertility, nor do we find significant effects on labor market outcomes in the long run.