María Lombardi

IEA: Can you tell us a little bit about your life story, what sparked your interest in economics, and how you decided to pursue an academic career?

María: I’m from Argentina, and I was in high school during the 2001 economic crisis when the country basically imploded. Witnessing the surge in poverty and inequality that occurred because of this crisis heavily influenced my decision to pursue an undergraduate degree in economics. However, my academic career didn’t follow a straightforward path. After university, I took a consulting job focused on regulation/finance. While this was a great learning experience, I wanted a career more aligned with my interests and with closer ties to policymaking. I decided to apply to a master’s program to give myself time to figure out what to do next. During my time pursuing a master’s degree in economics at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, I discovered the possibility of pursuing a Ph.D. and engaging in academic research. Prior to this, I had been unaware of the research-focused aspect of academia, believing professors solely concentrated on teaching. Although at first, I wanted to become a macroeconomist (as we Argentines often do), my interests quickly shifted towards applied microeconomics, as I enjoy using data to address policy-relevant questions.

IEA: In your recent work, you studied Telenovelas and attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community in Latin America. Could you summarize your findings and share what made you interested in this topic?

María: In this paper, joint with Selim Gulesci and Alejandra Ramos, we study whether exposure to LGBTQ+ characters in Telenovelas has an impact on attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our main motivation for studying this topic was the fact that although acceptance towards the LGBTQ+ community in the region has increased over the past decades, regressive views still persist. A large literature in economics and other disciplines has shown that under certain conditions, exposure to minority groups can reduce prejudice and improve attitudes towards the group. Therefore, we aimed to investigate whether the increasing depiction of LGBTQ+ characters in Telenovelas led to wider acceptance of this community.

We constructed a novel database with the LGBTQ+ characters featured in prime-time Telenovelas in 14 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2002-2019. Taking advantage of the fact that new shows with LGBTQ+ characters got on the air during the fieldwork of several nationally representative public opinion surveys, we compare the attitudes of respondents from the same country and wave that were interviewed before and after the new show was aired. We find a short-term backlash effect: individuals exposed to an additional soap opera featuring LGBTQ+ characters exhibit less tolerant attitudes towards homosexuals. This effect comes mainly from shows classified as comedies. Furthermore, it is stronger for individuals of groups with more traditional values (older, from rural areas, and those who frequently attend religious services). In summary, while edutainment and soap operas have the potential to shift attitudes, our findings suggest that in the short term, their mode of representation (both directly and indirectly through other media sources) may exacerbate discrimination by reproducing and amplifying existing stereotypes.

IEA: In another paper, you studied the impact of raising the minimum age of marriage in Mexico. Could you provide a summary of your findings?

María: Prior to 2014, minors in Mexico could legally marry under specific conditions, such as parental consent and meeting a minimum age requirement. Following a federal reform in 2014, Mexican states began revising their marriage laws to prohibit child marriage. Together with Cristina Bellés-Obrero, we use this policy reform to study the causal impact of raising the minimum age of marriage on teenage pregnancy and school dropout.

The staggered adoption of the reform across Mexican states provides an excellent opportunity to analyse the impact of age-of-marriage laws using a differences-in-differences event-study approach. Using rich administrative data from marriage registries, we first show that the reform was enforced, and find no change in the marriage rates of 18-year-olds. This indicates that couples responded to the ban by either delaying formal marriage further or dissolving before reaching the minimum marriage age. Despite this reduction in formal child marriages, our study shows precisely estimated zero effects on school attendance and early motherhood. Consequently, while the law effectively curbed formal child marriages, it did not successfully mitigate some of the adverse outcomes associated with this practice.

It is important to note that child marriages encompass not only formal unions but also informal cohabitation arrangements resembling marriage. A possible reason for the lack of impact on school attendance and early motherhood is that the decline in formal marriages was offset by an increase in informal unions. Using data on the civil status of young mothers at the time of delivery, we find that the reduction in the proportion of formally married mothers is entirely offset by an increase in the proportion of mothers in informal unions, resulting in overall child marriage rates remaining unaffected. Our findings suggest that in societies where cohabitation is a socially acceptable alternative to formal marriage, simply raising the minimum age of marriage may not be sufficient to curb child marriage rates or mitigate its adverse consequences.