Grandmothers and the gender gap in the Mexican labor market
利用祖母去世作为外生冲击，估计儿童保育可得性对父母就业概率的影响，发现祖母去世使母亲就业率下降12个百分点，对父亲无影响。
This paper estimates the effect of childcare availability on parents’ employment probability using the timing of the grandmothers’ death– the primary childcare provider in Mexico– as identifying variation. I use a triple-difference to disentangle the effect of coinhabiting grandmothers’ deaths due to their impact on childcare from their effects due to alternative mechanisms. Through their impact on childcare availability, grandmothers’ deaths reduce mothers’ employment rate by 12 percentage points (27 percent) and do not affect fathers’ employment rate. The negative effect on mothers’ employment is smaller where public daycare is more available, or private daycare or schools are more affordable.