Early labor induction - Consequences for high BMI mothers and their children (2023) with Maria K. Gregersen (U of Aarhus)
A large health economics literature has documented the longer run consequences of early health interventions. In this paper, we study a commonly used birth intervention, routine labour induction. Yet, in contrast to the majority of the existing evidence, we focus on a sub-population with increased pregnancies risk, high BMI women. Using a fuzzy-RD design, we exploit a Danish obstetric guideline mandating inductions for mothers with a BMI greater than 35 one week after term instead of 10-13 days after. First, we show that early induction benefit children’s and maternal’s health by substantially reducing birthweight for pregnancies being on the margin of being induced early because of a high BMI. Secondly, the intervention reduces maternal postpartum depression risks. Thirdly, we find no effect on labor supply in the years following birth. The overall positive health effects contrast with the more mixed evidence found for low-risks pregnancies. Thus, our findings highlight that different sup-populations may face different risks and benefits from health interventions. Such information is crucial when determining the best treatment for different type of pregnancies (and patients more broadly).
Postnatal Maternal Mental Health and Parental Behaviors (2022) with JC Hirani and M. Wüst [Work In Progress]
Learning about inequality and demand for redistribution: a meta-analysis of in-survey informational experiments (2021) with E. Ciani and T. Manfredi [WP Available Here]
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.
Browse this interactive map to see the number of treatments we gathered by country
The Gender Roulette: Quasi-experimental evidence the gender of the judge matters (2021) [Master Thesis/Available on demand]
In trials, does the gender of the judge matter when decisions are made? Does the number of females in a jury of a trial affect the outcome? Those questions are crucial and policy-relevant. However, their answers remained uncertain. Indeed, the existing literature relied on observational studies without solid identification strategies or on underpowered experiments with little external validity. In contrast, this master thesis draws on the likely random allocation of cases to judges in the same social chamber of the appeal court the same year to isolate such gender biases in France, using a unique dataset of 150,000 French labor courts decisions from 2006 to 2016.
Data suggests the number of females in jury trials does not matter in this setting. However, female presidents (judges) are more pro-worker than male presidents in two regards. Firstly, 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 but not solely explained by female presidents higher propensity to compensate the workers. Secondly, female presidents tend to reduce less the compensation than male presidents when the unemployment rate increases.
Picture generated from this abstract by Artificial Intelligence.