Research
Publications
Trapped by Tradition: Gender and Occupational Segregation in Peru
Using nearly two decades of census and household survey data, we document that occupational segregation in Peru persisted even after women surpassed men in educational attainment, and that marriage and motherhood are associated with a higher likelihood of segregation.
Under review
Never Off Duty: Grandmothers’ Co-residence and Mothers’ Labor Participation
Comparing mothers who live with a grandmother to those who do not, we find the former are more likely to work and to hold better-quality employment, suggesting that informal intergenerational caregiving substitutes for absent public childcare.
Does Scarcity Tax Parents’ Minds?
Low-income parents spend less time than advantaged parents on educational activities with their children, and a common explanation is that financial scarcity imposes a bandwidth tax on cognition. Surveying 1,932 mothers of kindergartners in Chicago Public Schools, we ask whether the binding constraint is attention or self-control, and whether the cost comes from low income itself or from the subjective experience of not having enough. Attentional capacity, not self-control, is the primary constraint, and felt scarcity rather than household income predicts attentional deficits.
A Novel Assessment of Epistemic Curiosity and its Association with Early Learning Outcomes
We develop and validate the Animal Game, a ten-trial behavioral task that measures epistemic curiosity in young children and can be administered in the field rather than the laboratory. In a socioeconomically diverse sample of 594 U.S. children aged three to six, the task yields a novelty score and a knowledge-seeking score, with high internal consistency and measurement invariance across child sex and parental education.
Working papers
Income Shocks and the Intergenerational Transmission of Executive Function
Using Baby’s First Years, a randomized trial of unconditional cash transfers to low-income mothers, we study the transmission of executive function from mothers to their four-year-old children.
Work in progress
Preschool Absenteeism and Experimental Sign-Up Bias: Evidence from a Field Experiment across U.S. States
A randomized field experiment across eight U.S. states testing whether a low-cost behavioral intervention reduces chronic absenteeism in early childhood. We build a new dataset linking daily administrative attendance records to parent surveys for 2,048 children in 49 Head Start centers. Opt-out recruitment enrols 98 percent of eligible families, which also lets us measure how volunteer recruitment shifts the estimated treatment effect. Pre-registered as AEARCTR-0014680.
How Traditional Are We? Gender Roles, Household Tasks, and Women’s Labor Force Participation in Peru
Drawing on the 2024 round of Peru’s National Survey of Social Relations, which introduces the first nationally representative battery of gender-role attitudes, I find that stronger traditional attitudes correlate with lower labor force participation among women, and that the unequal division of household tasks accounts for part of that association.
Other writing
Perú sin tiempo: la otra cara de la pobreza
Using Peru’s 2024 Time Use Survey, we estimate that 29.6 percent of Peruvians are time poor, above the 27.9 percent who are income poor, and that the burden falls hardest on women, on rural households and on adults between 31 and 65.