Discontinuity in General Physician Care During Pregnancy (2024)
The aging of the general physician workforce in developed countries is expected to lead to increased practice closures. Hence, concerns arise regarding the health effects of such closures, particularly for patients facing them during critical life stages such as pregnancy. However, no study exists to date on the health effects of general physicians' (GP) practice closures during pregnancy. I assess the effects of such closures during the patient's pregnancy on birth outcomes in Denmark. I compare the birth outcomes of mothers experiencing practice closures within nine months post-conception to those facing closures nine months pre-conception. I find a small to medium-sized adverse effect of discontinuity in care on birth outcomes. The negative effect on birth weight is especially pronounced when the closure happens in the last trimester of pregnancy. Consistently, mothers affected by GP practice closures during pregnancy experience small disruptions in healthcare provision at the extensive and at the intensive margin.


Grey dashed connected line represents the predicted fetal outcome using a range of fixed effects and pre-pregnancy parental variables.

This hints at closures harming the neonatal health of the most at-risk births.

Early labor induction - Consequences for high BMI mothers and their children (2024) with Maria K. Gregersen
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 causal 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 (suggestive). 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 lower-risks pregnancies.
Postnatal Maternal Mental Health and Parental Behaviors (2024) 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.
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.