Reforms that reduce alimony can affect married couples in two different ways. First, reduced alimony lowers the bargaining power of the payee, usually the wife. Second, reduced alimony lowers the incentives of wives to engage in the traditional male breadwinner model of household specialization....

Family-friendly laws may backfire if not all workers with access to the policies use them. Because these policies are costly to the employer, hiring practices may consequently be affected at the detriment of the at-risk population who may end up accessing the policy. We exploit a 1999 Spanish...

While much of the literature that investigates the part-time (PT) / full-time (FT) hourly wage differential and its causes focuses on average effects, very few studies analyze the heterogeneous effects of PT work across different subgroups, despite the policy relevance of understanding channels...

This paper examines the effect of economic incentives generated by U.S. divorce and custody law on a range of child health and human capital measures. State laws vary widely in the treatment of child support under joint custody. While some states require no child support in joint custody cases,...

With the COVID-19 outbreak imposing stay at home and social distancing policies, warnings about the impact of lockdown and its economic consequences on domestic violence has surged. This paper disentangles the effect of forced coexistence and economic stress on intimate partner violence. Using...

Using microdata for 35 countries over the period 1985-1994-2002 we find that labor market institutions traditionally associated to more compressed wage structures are associated to a higher family gap. Our results indicate that these policies reduce the price effect of having children but...

This paper analyzes the effects of entry labor-market conditions on workers' career in Spain, a country well known for its highly segmented labor market and rigid labor-market institutions. In contrast with more flexible labor markets, we find that the annual earnings losses of individuals...

Using a differences-in-differences approach and controlling for individual unobserved heterogeneity, we evaluate the impact of a 1999 law that granted all workers with children younger than 7 years old protection against a layoff if the worker had previously asked for a work-week reduction due...

We 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...

Using rich panel data recently available from Spanish Social Security records, we find that a negative motherhood earnings differential of 2.3 log points remains even after controlling for both individual- and firm-level unobserved heterogeneity. The analysis of the mothers and childless women's...