This dissertation contains two chapters. The first one is on microenterprises in developing countries and how they face competition from large corporations. The second one is on estimating the causal effect of childcare availability on the formation and persistence of gender gaps in the Mexican labor market. The first chapter is motivated by hundreds of millions of microenterprises in emerging economies facing increased competition from the entry and expansion of large firms that offer similar or identical products. This chapter studies how one of the world's most prevalent microenterprises, neighborhood shops, confront competition from convenience chains (e.g., 7-Eleven) in Mexico. To address the endogeneity in time and location of chains' store openings, I construct an instrument that captures a cost reduction and profitability increase for chains but not for shops. The instrument exploits two key differences between them: i) chains build economies of scale from cost-sharing across stores in adjacent cities, and ii) within cities, chains are more than three times as likely to open stores on wide streets. The results show that an increase from zero to the average number of chain stores in a neighborhood reduces the number of shops by 17%. This reduction is driven by a decrease in shop entry and not by an increase in shop exit. Shops retain 95% of their customers and their sales of fresh products, but customers visit shops less often and spend less on non-fresh and packed goods. I find evidence consistent with shops having comparative advantages stemming from being small and owner-operated, such as lower agency costs, building relationships with the community, and offering informal credit. The second chapter estimates the effect of childcare availability on parents' employment using the timing of grandmothers' death-- the primary childcare provider in Mexico-- as identifying variation. I use a triple-difference to disentangle the effect of coinhabiting grandmothers' deaths due to their impact on childcare from their effects due to alternative mechanisms. Through their impact on childcare availability, grandmothers' deaths reduce mothers' employment rate by 12 percentage points (27 percent) and do not affect fathers' employment. The negative effect on mothers' employment is smaller where public daycare is more available, or private daycare or schools are more affordable.

Creator

• Talamas Marcos, Miguel Angel

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-cs0y-rj68

Subject

• Economics

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_898300
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16012

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright