Dominican Republic fact of the day

I find that a free trade zone in a province delays the age of first marriage by 1.6 years.  Moreover, the probability of early marriage is reduced by 30 percentage points.  The results are primarily driven by women that were in school at the time of the opening.  The free trade zones increase women’s years of education, especially during secondary school.

That is from a paper by Maria Micaela Sviatschi (pdf), who is on the job market from Columbia University.  Hers is one of the most interesting portfolios I have seen this year.

Another paper of hers shows that indoor prostitution lowers sex crime (pdf).  Her job market paper (pdf) is on how childhood exposure to illegal activities can breed criminal behavior later in life, here is the abstract:

This paper shows that exposing children to illegal labor markets makes them more likely to be criminals as adults. I exploit the timing of a large anti-drug policy in Colombia that shifted cocaine production to locations in Peru that were well-suited to growing coca. In these areas, children harvest coca leaves and transport processed cocaine. Using variation across locations, years, and cohorts, combined with administrative data on the universe of individuals in prison in Peru, affected children are 30% more likely to be incarcerated for violent and drug-related crimes as adults. The biggest impacts on adult criminality are seen among children who experienced high coca prices in their early teens, the age when child labor responds the most. No effect is found for individuals that grow up working in places where the coca produced goes primarily to the legal sector, implying that it is the accumulation of human capital specific to the illegal industry that fosters criminal careers. As children involved in the illegal industry learn how to navigate outside the rule of law, they also lose trust in government institutions. However, consistent with a model of parental incentives for human capital investments in children, the rollout of a conditional cash transfer program that encourages schooling mitigates the effects of exposure to illegal industries. Finally, I show how the program can be targeted by taking into account the geographic distribution of coca suitability and spatial spillovers. This paper takes a first step towards understanding how criminals are formed by unpacking the way in which crime-specific human capital is developed at the expense of formal human capital in bad locations.

She has numerous papers and virtually all of them look quite interesting.  Other topics include whether domestic violence lowers human capital investment and the economic effects of the (former) gang truce in El Salvador.  Here is her basic research portfolio.