between home time (that includes time spent caring for children) and consumpt i o n goods,
extensions in the school day provide school-age children’s main caregivers with a higher
e↵ective time endowment, by freeing time that was previously spent providing child care.
3
Given that children’s main caregivers tend to be mothers or other female family members,
this allows for a highe r female labor force participation.
4
As intra-household bargaining
models suggest, the position of women in bargaining can inc re ase if the level of utili ty they
can independently achieve increases. In this case, women’s outside option can increase either
because of a hi gh e r female individual income (for women who increase their labor suppl y )
or due to the potential of increasing their income (for those women who do not adjust their
labor supply but can do so beca u se o f th ei r ex p an d e d ti m e endowment).
5
From a theoretical perspective, the direction of the expected e↵ect of changes in barg a i n -
ing power and female economic indepe n d en ce that may result from the extension in FTS
on marriage stability is inconclusive. In line with the independence e↵ect hypothesis (Ross
et al., 1975), divorce can increase due to the potential increase in independent sources of
income for women.
6
Moreover, female employment may lead to within househol d conflict or
higher intimate partner violence (Eswaran and Malhotra, 2011; Heath, 2014; Krishnan et al. ,
3
The simplifying assumption is that the consumption good s bundle doe s not inclu de childcare services
due (for example) to lack of availability. Supp os e we as su me that alternative paid sources of childcare are
available. In that case, the school day extension can be interpreted as in line with a model in which the
price of childcare services (included in the consumption bundle) declines.
4
For the particular case of the FTS program implemented in Mexico, there is evidence that this pol-
icy significantly increased female employment (Padilla-Romo and Cabrera-Hern´andez, 2019; Kozhaya and
Mart´ınez Flores, 2020; Cabrera-Hern´andez and Padilla-Romo, 2020). The connection between childcare and
female labor forc e participation (in countries di↵erent from Mexico) has been studied by Gelbach (2002),
Berlinski and Galiani (2007), Lefebvre and Merrigan (2008), Goux and Maurin (2010), Bauernschust e r an d
Schlotter (2015), Nollenberge r and Rodriguez-Planas (2015), Carta and Rizzica (2018), Eckho↵ Andresen
and Havnes (2019), and Berthelon et al. (2022), amon g others.
5
Increases in labor force p ar t ic i pat i on (and improvements in the type of emp l oyment) have been iden-
tified as positively associated with women’s bargaining power (Anderson and Eswaran, 2009; Heath and
Jayachandran, 2018). Importantly, increasing women’s labor force participation is not a necessary condition
for hi gh er bargai n i ng power. For examp le , Majlesi (2016) shows that higher employment opportunities for
women in Mexico lead to inc r ease s in women’s bargaining power .
6
In the same direction, Becker (1981) explains that the gain s from marriage are reduced, and divorce
becomes more attractive when the re is an incre ase in fe mal e earn i ngs . An important related dimension that
may a↵ect marriage dissol u ti on is the relat i ve earnings of the spouses. In their analysis for the United States,
Bertrand et al. (2015) find that marriages in which the husband earns less than t h e wife are more likely to
get a divorce. Using variation in manufacturing plant openings in Mexico, Estefan D´avila (2018) shows that
a reducti on in the male-female earnings inequality increases divorce rates.
2