Browsing by Author "Tessada, Jose"

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    Can gamified online training make high school students more entrepreneurial? Experimental evidence from Rwanda
    (2024) Lafortune, Jeanne; Pugatch, Todd; Tessada, Jose; Ubfal, Diego
    We study the short-run effects of a gamified online entrepreneurship training offered to high school students in Rwanda during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a randomized controlled trial, we estimate sizeable effects of the 6-week training on entrepreneurial activity. One month after the training, participants in schools offered the training were much more likely to own a business than participants in control schools. The training induced students to participate more actively in their school's business club, to undertake more business-oriented actions, to improve their business practices, and to interact more with other youth and family members about their business ideas. We hypothesize that the training motivated treated students to sustain their business activities during the COVID-19 crisis.
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    Low-Skilled Immigration and the Labor Supply of Highly Skilled Women
    (AMER ECONOMIC ASSOC, 2011) Cortes, Patricia; Tessada, Jose
    Low-skilled immigrants represent a significant fraction of employment in services that are close substitutes of household production. This paper studies whether the increased supply of low-skilled immigrants has led high-skilled women, who have the highest opportunity cost of time, to change their time-use decisions. Exploiting cross-city variation in immigrant concentration, we find that low-skilled immigration increases average hours of market work and the probability of working long hours of women at the top quartile of the wage distribution. Consistently, we find that women in this group decrease the time they spend in household work and increase expenditures on housekeeping services. (JEL J16, J22, J24, J61)
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    The redistributive effects of size-dependent childcare policies
    (2024) Escobar, Diego; Lafortune, Jeanne; Rubini, Loris; Tessada, Jose
    Governments often adopt policies to reduce the cost of childcare for working families, but those can distort the allocation of resources. We develop and calibrate a general equilibrium model with firm and household heterogeneity and study the case of Chile, where firms with more than 19 female employees must provide childcare. We find that removing this policy would increase welfare on average by 2.3% of consumption equivalent units over their lifetime. However, the removal would not translate into increases in GDP, in part because of a reduced labor supply. Instead, the main effects of the policy are redistributive, shifting resources away from females towards males. The policy reduces welfare for most females, and these losses are decreasing in income. In particular, low-education single females, who do not rely on a second wage, would gain up to 20% in consumption equivalent units by removing the policy. We propose that alternative childcare financing options would be preferred. Specifically, financing childcare through labor taxes would increase aggregate welfare by over 13%, with the largest gains accruing to single, low-education mothers.
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    What Is the Price of Freedom? Estimating Women's Willingness to Pay for Job Schedule Flexibility
    (Univ. Chicago Press, 2023) Bustelo, Monserrat; Diaz, Ana Maria; Lafortune, Jeanne; Piras, Claudia; Salas, Luz Magdalena; Tessada, Jose
    We conducted a discrete choice experiment to elicit women's revealed preferences regarding job schedule flexibility (flexible scheduling and part-time employment) in a developing country context. We did so with an incentivized methodology for job seekers. On average, women have a high willingness to pay for a flexible schedule within a full-time contract but a much lower desire to trade wages for part-time contracts. The willingness to pay for a flexible work arrangement is largest for more affluent women, while willingness to pay for part-time employment is highest among those with higher time demands.