Formalizing Domestic Work: Evidence from a social security reform in Spain. Joint with Alejandro Iribas.

We provide causal evidence on the sector-wide consequences of formalization of labor through a social security reform. We evaluate the 2012 reform of Spain’s social security special regime for domestic workers, a highly informal, female-dominated sector. Using administrative and survey data, we estimate the impact of the reform on employment and earnings at the sector level. Although the reform reduced informality, with a drop in the informality rate from 60 to 30%, it also reduced the duration of formal employment and decreased the earnings of incumbents. These effects are mainly driven by older, Spanish-born domestic workers. Total employment in the sector has decreased over time as a result of the reform, raising concerns about the sustainability of formal domestic work

Careers to Carers? Pension policy and mother's economic outcomes. Joint with Eppie van Egeraat.

We use a policy that increased pension wealth for low-earnings mothers up to 6 years after giving birth in Norway to study the response of maternal labor supply in response to higher future income. This policy allows us to explore the trade-off between acknowledging unpaid care work in pension systems and disincentivizing labor supply of working-age mothers, which may in fact broaden the gender gap in pensions. We implement a regression discontinuity difference-in-differences (RD-DD) design to consider the impact of childcare-related pension credits on labor market outcomes up to 16 years after birth. We do not find any reductions in employment, earnings, nor take-up of other benefits as a result of the policy. This suggests that pension credits can narrow the gender pension gap with no or very small distortionary effects when applied early enough.

Closing the Gender Gap in Pensions? Pension accrual for unpaid care work and household behavior after retirement. Single-authored project.

I provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of a pure change in pension wealth on the eve of retirement. I exploit a 2010 Norwegian policy reform that retroactively extended childcare-related pension credits to mothers of children born between 1967 and 1991. Using population-wide administrative data, I estimate pension benefits for all beneficiaries had the policy not been adopted and implement a difference-in-differences design, leveraging the variation in the credits’ impact on final pension benefits. My findings show that the policy contributed to a 1.4 percentage point reduction of the gender gap in lifetime pension benefits. I document a negative effect on employment, earnings and take-up of benefits through anticipation of pension claiming, together with spillovers to the beneficiaries' partners. I track the increase in pension benefits along the different income and wealth components to study the impact on consumption. Finally, I combine these outcomes to estimate the MVPF of correcting gender differences in lifetime income ex post.

The role of firms in early retirement decisions. Joint with Andreas Haller and Julian Vedeler Johnsen.

Before the start of my PhD, I also contributed to the following OECD publications: