Working Papers

Religious Media, Conversion and its Socioeconomic Consequences: The Rise of Pentecostals in Brazil (with Giulia Buccione)

Presented at: NEUDC 2023, Summer Meeting Econometric Society 2023 (Los Angeles), European Economic Society 2023 (Barcelona), RIGDE 2022, ASREC 2023 (Cambridge, MA), ASREC 2023 (Melbourne), ASREC 2022 (London), NEUDC 2021, LACEA 2021, SBE 2020

We investigate the role of religious media in promoting new religious movements and shaping socio-economic outcomes. Focusing on the rapid growth of Pentecostalism in Brazil, we use quasi-random variation in exposure to a church-affiliated TV channel to estimate its impact. Exploiting the placement of transmitters prior to the channel’s religious affiliation, we find that exposure increased Pentecostal affiliation by 30%. Consistent with the church’s conservative gender norms, municipalities exposed to the channel experienced higher fertility rates, lower female labor force participation, reduced schooling for young women, and increased support for Pentecostal candidates, with no effects on male employment or education. Event-study analysis reveals that the number of Pentecostal churches expanded following the channel’s introduction, underscoring the role of media in driving both religious and social change.

Free Childcare and the Motherhood Penalty: Evidence from São Paulo (with Joao Garcia and Rafael Latham-Proença) 

Presented at: NEUDC 2022, LACEA 2022, GeFam Workshop

Latin America consistently has some of the largest child penalties for female work globally, and while subsidized childcare is often advanced as a remedy, the literature on its effectiveness is scarce in this context. This paper estimates the impact of a rapid expansion of public childcare on mothers’ careers in the city of Sao Paulo. We leverage the rollout and expansion of childcare facilities, coupled with detailed data on the labor market and household characteristics, to identify effects on mothers’ labor force participation and earnings. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we compare the child penalty in districts that experienced a large and rapid expansion of childcare with districts with no significant expansion. Our results show that an additional seat per child leads to an increase of 6.7 p.p. (20%) in the mothers’ formal employment after the first child’s birth. We do not detect any effect of this expansion on mothers-to-be or fathers. Effects are stronger for low-education mothers and in areas with more women as household heads.

Congenital Disability Effects on Parents' Labor Supply and Family Composition:  Evidence from the Zika Virus Outbreak (with João Garcia and Rafael Latham-Proença) 

Having a child with a severe congenital disability deeply impacts family life, yet there is limited evidence on how these shocks affect economic outcomes. We study a shock to disability incidence caused by the Zika Virus epidemic in Brazil, which caused thousands of children to be born with microcephaly. Using data on the universe of births and formal employment linked to a sample of poor mothers, we find that, compared to controls, mothers of Zika-affected infants experience a 66% larger motherhood penalty in the formal labor market. Informal employment does not compensate this difference. We show suggestive evidence of significant disemployment effects of social security benefits, but effects are still significant for non-recipients. In contrast, father’s labor outcomes were unaffected. We also find lower fertility for affected families as well as local spillovers, but no effect on marriage dissolution.

Work in Progress

Religious Mayors and Sexual Education in Schools (Draft coming soon!)

Pentecostalism is one of the fastest-growing religious movements in the world, already constituting nearly 15% of the population in Latin America and Africa. This new religion preaches more conservative values, influences the social behavior of the faithful, and, in Brazil, has been increasingly involved in politics, raising the question of the socioeconomic implications of their expansion. In this paper, I analyze the impact of mayors from Pentecostal-affiliated parties on teenage pregnancy, employing close-race elections to identify causal effects. I find an increase of 5 births per thousand teenagers (15% above the baseline) in municipalities where mayors from Pentecostal-affiliated parties won by a narrow margin. The mechanism I explore is the removal of sexual education activities from municipal schools. Mayors in Brazil can appoint the headmaster of municipal schools, thus choosing the ones that better align with their views. I find that municipal schools are 20 p.p. less likely to offer sexual education activities in municipalities where mayors of parties affiliated with the Pentecostal church won by a small margin of votes. I do not find any effects on state schools, as mayors do not appoint the headmaster in these schools.