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Data from: Leaving the shadows behind? Effects of domestic workers reform on mothers’ formal employment

Boruchowicz, Cynthia1

Published Oct 29, 2024 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zw3r228hr

Data files

Oct 29, 2024 version files 89.05 KB

Abstract

The study "Leaving the Shadows Behind? Effects of Domestic Workers Reform on Mothers' Formal Employment" attempts to answer the question: What happens when new labor regulations are implemented and enforced while a welfare cash transfer is already in place? It does so by analyzing the effects on employment and formality resulting from the introduction of Argentine National Law 26.844 ('Private Homes Employee's Regime') in April 2013, differentiated by the age of the domestic worker's youngest child. The data source for this analysis comes from the Argentinean National Household Survey (EPH, for its name in Spanish) for the period 2010-2015. The EPH is collected by the National Institute of Statistics (INDEC) and contains quarterly individual and household microdata for 32 urban areas representing 62 percent of the country's total population (Garganta and Gasparini, 2015). The EPH follows a rotation scheme in which a household in a certain area enters the sample for two quarters in a row, retires for the next two quarters, and returns for two more quarters. In this case, the panel structure of the survey was not exploited because of the small number of domestic workers sampled before and after the reform. As such, each quarterly observation is used as a repeated cross-section with standard errors clustered in the urban area. The final sample consists of women aged between 18 and 59 years who are Argentinean residents, mothers with children in the household, either single or married to an unregistered spouse and who self-identify as domestic workers. The former means that the woman states that domestic work is either her main activity or, if unemployed, that her last occupation is domestic work. The EPH contains detailed self-reported information on domestic workers living in their own dwellings, including their household and job characteristics. Domestic workers who co-reside with their employers are excluded from this analysis because they represent a small number of observations in the sample and because no household information is available for them. The sample also excludes workers who (if employed) have been working for the same employer for more than 25 years, and those who work for over 50 hours per week. The previous is an attempt to make the groups of domestic workers with children below 18 years old and with children 18 years old or above more comparable.