João Marcos Garcia
I am an Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), working in labor, gender and health in developing countries.
You can contact me at joao.garcia@usach.cl, and you can find my CV here. I am also on Google Scholar and ORCID.
Working Papers
Religious Mayors, School Appointments, and Teenage Pregnancy
with Marcela Mello
When religious movements win executive office, they can use bureaucratic levers to reshape public services along doctrinal lines. Using a regression discontinuity design on close mayoral elections in Brazil, we show that girls exposed to Pentecostal-party mayors during middle school experience birth rates 40% higher, elevated STD rates, reduced HPV vaccination, and higher dropout rates; older cohorts already past school show no effects. The mechanism operates through personnel: these mayors replace school principals and reduce sexual education in municipal schools by 12.5 percentage points, with no changes in state schools outside their control. No effects emerge from other right-wing parties.
Free Childcare and the Motherhood Penalty: Evidence from São Paulo
with Rafael Latham-Proença, Marcela Mello and Joana Silva
Latin America consistently has some of the world's largest motherhood penalties for women, and while subsidized childcare is often advanced as a remedy, the literature on its effectiveness is scarce outside developed countries. This paper estimates the impact of a rapid expansion of public childcare on mothers' careers in the city of São Paulo. We leverage the precise location and timing of the expansion of childcare facilities, coupled with detailed data on the labor market and household characteristics to identify effects on mothers' formal employment and earnings. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we compare the motherhood penalty in districts that experienced a large and rapid expansion of childcare with districts with no significant expansion. Our results show that an additional seat per child leads to an increase of 6.8 p.p. in the mothers' formal employment (about 20% of post-birth mean) after the first child's birth. We do not detect any effect of this expansion on two comparison groups: mothers-to-be and fathers.
Child Disability and Parental Labor Supply
with Rafael Latham-Proença, Marcela Mello and Joana Silva
Having a child with a severe congenital disability deeply impacts family life, yet evidence on the economic effects remains limited. This paper examines the impact of a child health shock causing lifelong disability on household labor market outcomes in Brazil. Using an exogenous shock to disability incidence, the Zika virus epidemic, which caused a surge of microcephaly cases in children, we find that mothers of affected children reduce labor force participation, including informal work. The shock makes the motherhood penalty 75% larger (a 12.0 p.p. reduction compared to 6.8 p.p. in controls). Informality does not seem to serve as a buffer, as informal employment is reduced by an additional 20 p.p. (50%). Brazil's disability payment system supplements income but intensifies maternal employment losses. Results suggest that child health shocks have persistent economic impacts beyond immediate health conditions and that, in developing countries, informality and welfare programs shape these impacts.