Abstract: Cutoff dates for school enrollment—a ubiquitous feature of educational systems worldwide—produce different possibility sets for households with children born on different dates. Using survey data from Mexico we examine whether school-enrollment cutoffs affect labor supply. Our results are imprecise but suggest that mothers whose youngest child was born before the cutoff (and therefore were able to enroll their child in school one year earlier) are 0.8-1.2 percentage points more likely to work. This is equivalent to a 5-8% increase among the group of marginal mothers. We conclude that the school-enrollment cutoff is a random tax with little deadweight loss because most mothers are infra- or supramarginal.

Acerca del expositor: Brenda Samaniego de la Parra is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before joining the Economics Department at UC Santa Cruz, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, an Associate at Cornerstone Research, and served as Special Projects Deputy Director for the National Banking and Securities Commission in Mexico. She is an external consultant for the World Bank and the International Labour Organization. Her research analyzes different work arrangements between workers and firms with a special focus on informality, how they respond to shocks, and their implications for wages and employment dynamics. Her work has provided novel estimates on the share of informal employment within formal firms, and the impact of policies aimed at increasing formal work. She received a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

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