Postpartum depression and the motherhood penalty (2025) with Sonia Bhalotra, N. Meltem Daysal, Jonas Cuzulan Hirani, Priyama Majumdar, Mircea Trandafir, Miriam Wüst, and Tom Zohar
Revise and Resubmit at The Review of Economics and Statistics
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Using Danish administrative data linked to two independent, validated postpartum depression screenings, we study how postpartum mental health shocks shape women’s labor market trajectories. Event-study estimates show no pre-birth differences in trends between depressed and non-depressed mothers, but persistent employment gaps that widen immediately after birth. Health-care utilization patterns indicate that these differences reflect acute mental health shocks rather than pre-existing trends. The penalties are concentrated among less educated mothers and those in less family-friendly jobs. Our results highlight postpartum depression as a meaningful and unequal contributor to the motherhood penalty.
Discontinuity in General Physician Care During Pregnancy (2026)
Under Review​​
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I study the causal effect of discontinuity in primary care during pregnancy on birth outcomes, using General Practitioner practice closures in Denmark as a natural experiment. Discontinuity in care reduces birth weight and increases the likelihood of being small for gestational age, with effects driven by closures occurring in the third pregnancy trimester and by more disadvantaged mothers (those in rural areas or without college education). Consistent with these results, mothers facing a closure during pregnancy experience disruptions in healthcare use at both the extensive and intensive margins.
Learning about inequality and demand for redistribution: a meta-analysis of in-survey informational experiments (2021) with E. Ciani and T. Manfredi [Working Paper]
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A growing body of literature studies the effect of providing information about inequality to respondents of surveys on their preferences for redistribution. We provide a meta-analysis combining the results from 84 information treatments coming from 36 studies in Economics, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. This meta-analysis complements and informs a broader project on perceptions of inequality and preferences for redistribution ( Does Inequality Matter? How People Perceive Economic Disparities and Social Mobility , OECD publishing, Paris, 2021). In the meta-analysis, we focus on in-survey experiments where a randomly selected group of respondents receive either information about the overall extent of inequalities, or about their position in the income distribution. The results show that providing information on inequality has a sizeable impact on people’s perceptions and concerns about inequality, but a rather small effect on their demand for redistribution. Inspecting the heterogeneity across treatments and outcomes helps explaining the small average effect on demand for redistribution, but the evidence is not yet conclusive about the potential explanations. We further show that correcting respondents’ misperceptions about their own position in the income distribution increases the preferences for redistribution for those who previously overestimated their position and decreases it for those who underestimated, although the effects are, on average, small.
Gender Roulette? Causal Evidence one the Impact of Judge Gender in Labor Court Appeals (2024)
I study the causal effect of the gender of the judge of the outcome of a trial in the context of the appeal of labor courts. Using scrapped French labor courts decisions from 2006 to 2016, I leverage as-good-as-random allocation of cases to judges in the same appeal court the same year to isolate such gender biases in France. I find female presidents (judges) to be substantially more pro-worker than male presidents. On average, a worker being judged by a female rather than a male president can expect up to two supplementary months of salary of compensation for a wrongful dismissal. This discrepancy is mainly explained by female presidents higher propensity to compensate the workers.