Work in Progress
- Child Outcomes in Cohabiting vs. Married Families: Does Marital Status Matter?
Authors: Pablo Rosa, Cristina Borra
Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of family structure on early-life outcomes and its implications for the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Exploiting the staggered introduction of regional laws in Spain recognizing stable partnerships (“Leyes de Parejas de Hecho o Parejas Estables”), we leverage a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effects of incentivizing cohabitation over marriage on children’s health outcomes. Our results indicate that these laws significantly increased the likelihood of entering a cohabiting union, but only among women who were at the margin of marrying; the policy had no discernible effect on the probability of single motherhood. Drawing on detailed administrative data from birth certificates, we provide robust evidence that the enactment of these laws did not lead to significant changes in health outcomes at birth. In contrast to prior studies based on correlational evidence, our results indicate that observed disparities are unlikely to result from partnership status itself, and instead reflect underlying socioeconomic factors or selection mechanisms shaping cohabitation decisions.
- Gender Gaps in Reaction to Reward-Only Incentives
Authors: Pablo Rosa, Cristina Borra, and Pilar Cuevas-Ruíz
Abstract: We study how increasing positive-only incentives in a real-world, high-stakes setting affects gender gaps in performance. We exploit a 2016 reform of Spain’s university entrance examination that let a strong Mathematics grade count twice toward the admission score, raising the returns to excelling without changing the penalty for poor performance. Using administrative data on science-track students in Andalusia (2010–2018) and a difference-in-differences design, we find the reform widened the gender gap by about 0.07 standard deviations, driven by a relative decline in female performance. The effect is concentrated in Technological Sciences, where the reform raised incentives, and absent in Health Sciences, where the incentive weights were unchanged. This heterogeneity points to incentive intensity, not selection, as the mechanism. Unlike in laboratory settings, where reward-only incentives leave the gender gap unchanged, such incentives widen it once real stakes are involved, even when they reward success without penalizing failure.
Invited Seminars
- Universidad de Granada - 2025.
- Universidad Pablo de Olavide - 2025.
Conference Presentations / Workshops
- The 2026 annual meeting of the Society of Economics of the Household (SEHO) - University of Pavia.
- The 2025 annual meeting of the Society of Economics of the Household (SEHO) - 2025, Universidad de Zaragoza.
- Early Career & PhD Workshop on SocioEconomic Mobility and Public Policies (WEIPO) - 2025, Universidad de Alcalá.
- 50th Simposio De La Asociación Española De Economía (SAEe) - 2025, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.
Upcoming