No abstract

Based on a novel survey for Argentina, this paper provides evidence of the changes in time allocation within couples during the COVID-19 emergency. The survey was conducted online during the period of national lockdown in 2020 and collected information on hours allocated to paid work, housework, child care, educational childcare and leisure by both members of the couple before and during the lockdown, as well as socio-demographic characteristics. Our sample consists of 961 couples of which 785 have children. Our results indicate that during the lockdown, despite a reduction in time assigned to paid work and an increase in time spent in unpaid activities for both members of the couple, gender gaps regarding the latter increased. Specifically, while the load of men and women's work for pay became more equitable, women took up a larger proportion of the additional housework and childcare. We found that some factors mitigated (whether the man reduced his hours of work or whether both partners kept on doing so) while others potentiated (whether the woman reduced her hours of work, whether she continued working from home, or whether the couple outsourced housework before lockdown) the changes in the within-couple gender gaps in unpaid activities.

Argentina has traditionally stood out in terms of educational outcomes among its Latin American counterparts. Schooling of older children, however, still shows room for improvement especially among the more vulnerable. Fortunately, during the last years a sizeable improvement in attendance rates for children aged 15 through 17 took place. This could be related to the 2006 National Education Law that made upper-secondary education compulsory. In this paper, instead, we claim that the Asignación Universal por Hijo (Universal Child Allowance, AUH) -a massive conditional cash transfer program implemented in 2009 in Argentina- may be mostly responsible for this improvement. Using a difference-in-difference strategy we estimate that the program accounts for a 3.9 percentage point increase in the probability of attending secondary school among eligible children aged 15 through 17. The impact seems to be led by boys and is more relevant for children living in larger families where the head of household has a lower educational level.

We study the causal effect of motherhood on labour market outcomes in Latin America by adopting an event study approach around the birth of the first child based on panel data from national household surveys for Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. Our main contributions are: (i) providing new and comparable evidence on the effects of motherhood on labour outcomes in developing countries; (ii) exploring the possible mechanisms driving these outcomes; (iii) discussing the potential links between child penalty and the prevailing gender norms and family policies in the region. We find that motherhood reduces women’s labour supply in the extensive and intensive margins and influences female occupational structure towards flexible occupations—part-time work, self-employment, and labour informality—needed for family–work balance. Furthermore, countries with more conservative gender norms and less generous family policies are associated with larger differences between mothers’ and non-mothers’ labour market outcomes.