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Publications (152)
The shock of the COVID‐19 pandemic affected the human capital formation of children and youths. As a consequence of this disruption, the pandemic is likely to imply permanent lower levels of human capital. This paper provides new evidence on the impact of COVID‐19 and school closures on education in Latin America by exploiting harmonized microdata...
Using households survey microdata from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, we characterize changes in employment and wages between the mid-2000s and the late-2010s emphasizing the gender dimension from the viewpoint of the task-based approach. We employ surveys from PIAAC-OECD to study the task content of jobs and create an index o...
We explore the relationship between social mobility and economic development. First, we map the geography of intergenerational mobility in education for 52 Latin American regions, and examine its evolution over time. Then, through a new weighting procedure considering the level of participation of various cohorts in the economy in each year, we est...
Este trabajo examina el desarrollo de América Latina durante las últimas tres décadas mediante curvas de incidencia del crecimiento y tasas de crecimiento ponderadas calculadas sobre la base de microdatos armonizados de encuestas de hogares. Durante las últimas tres décadas América Latina ha avanzado en términos de la mayoría de los indicadores bás...
This paper assesses gender differences in the effects of adverse conditions at labor-market entry in a developing region. Using harmonized microdata from national household surveys for 15 Latin American countries, we build a synthetic panel of cohorts that potentially transition from school to work and observe their labor market outcomes 10 years l...
Asymmetry in childcare responsibilities is one of the main reasons behind gender gaps in the labor market. In that context, the ability to work from home may alleviate the hindrances of women with children to participate in the labor market. We study these issues in Latin America, a region with wide gender gaps, in the framework of a major shock th...
The shock of the COVID-19 pandemic affected the human capital formation of children and youths. As a consequence of this disruption, the pandemic is likely to imply permanent lower levels of human capital. This paper provides new evidence on the impact of COVID-19 and school closures on education in Latin America by exploiting harmonized microdata...
Este artículo estima el papel del teletrabajo como mitigador del impacto de la pandemia del COVID-19 en el mercado laboral argentino. Para ese propósito, se analiza la relación entre el potencial de teletrabajo a nivel ocupacional estimado en base a tres encuestas diferentes (O*NET, PIAAC, y STEP), y los resultados del mercado laboral a nivel indiv...
En este trabajo se propone definir a la población más vulnerable de un país como aquellos individuos en hogares con alta probabilidad de ser pobres por ingreso en el presente, y bajo los distintos escenarios del pasado reciente. Se argumenta que esta definición permite una caracterización más ajustada de la población carenciada que la tradicional b...
A common assumption in the literature is that the actual level of income inequality shapes individuals’ beliefs about whether the income distribution is fair (“fairness views,” for short). However, individuals do not directly observe income inequality (which often leads to large misperceptions), nor do they consider all inequities to be unfair. In...
We study the risk of automation, the unfeasibility of teleworking and the risk of contagion due to physical proximity in the six largest economies in Latin America. We find that workers with low education, informal, and low-wage levels are the most exposed to this type of risk. Automation and health crises may have significant unequalizing effects....
We study the effect of robots on labor markets in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, the major robot users in Latin America, during the period 2004-2016. We exploit spatial and time variations in exposure to robots arising from initial differences in industry specialization across geographic locations and the evolution of robot adoption across industri...
New automation technologies affect workers in a heterogeneous manner according to their demographic characteristics, skills, and the tasks they perform. In this paper we study the effects of automation on labor market outcomes in a developing country, Chile. We focus our analysis on the heterogeneous impacts of automation across cohorts. Does autom...
A common assumption in the literature is that the actual level of income inequality shapes individuals' beliefs about whether the income distribution is fair ("fairness views," for short). However, individuals do not directly observe income inequality (which often leads to large misperceptions), nor do they consider all inequities to be unfair. In...
This paper assesses gender differences in the effects of adverse conditions at labor-market entry in a developing region. Using harmonized microdata from national household surveys for 15 Latin American countries, we build a synthetic panel of cohorts that potentially transition from school to work and observe their labor market outcomes 10 years l...
This paper studies factors that could account for the asymmetric impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America, by exploiting microdata from the World Bank’s high-frequency phone household surveys conducted immediately after the onset of the pandemic. The paper codifies the occupation variables in these surveys, constructs measures of the indivi...
The `paradox of progress' is an empirical regularity that associates more education with larger income inequality. Two driving and competing factors behind this phenomenon are the convexity of the `Mincer equation' (that links wages and education) and the heterogeneity in its returns, as captured by quantile regressions. We propose a joint least-sq...
We estimate the role of teleworking as a mitigator of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic shock on the Argentine labor market. To that aim, we analyze the link between occupational-level teleworking potential scores, estimated from three different surveys (O*NET, PIAAC, and STEP) and labor market outcomes at the individual level, exploiting the rot...
Preferences for redistribution are critical determinants of the size of the welfare state and, therefore, of the level of inequality in a country. In this paper, we explore the effect of immigration on preferences for redistribution in the context of migration in Latin America, where migrants tend to have characteristics more similar to those of na...
We study Chile's labor market responses to trade shocks between 1996 and 2006, exploiting spatial variation in trade exposure arising from initial differences in industry specialization across local labor markets. We take advantage of China's supply and demand worldwide shocks to instrument for Chinese import competition and demand for Chilean expo...
This article documents the level and trends of monetary inequality in developing countries based on PovcalNet data, up to the year 2015. On average, during the first half of the 2010s, in inequality declined in developing economies, although it did so at a substantially lower rate as compared to the 2000s. The current average Gini coefficient is hi...
This paper studies the effects of automation of production on labor market outcomes, and whether there is an effect of automation on functional and personal inequality in Latin America. The paper combines several data sources and empirical strategies in order to approach the issues from different perspectives and to cover different dimensions of la...
We study changes in employment by occupations characterized by different degree of exposure to routinization in the six largest Latin American economies over the last two decades. We combine our own indicators of routine task content based on information from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIACC) with labor ma...
In this paper we characterize workers' vulnerability to automation in the near future in the six largest Latin American economies as a function of the exposure to routinization of the tasks that they perform and the potential automation of their occupation. We combine (i) indicators of potential automatability by occupation and (ii) worker's inform...
Este trabajo estudia la evolución de las brechas salariales por nivel educativo y su relación con la estructura productiva en 16 países de América Latina, con base en microdatos de encuestas de hogares e información de cuentas nacionales en el periodo de 1991 a 2015. La evidencia sugiere que el cambio en la estructura productiva está correlacionado...
En este estudio evaluamos la viabilidad del trabajo remoto en Argentina combinando datos sobre características de las ocupaciones de O*NET con información de empleo de la EPH. Las ocupaciones menos compatibles con el teletrabajo están caracterizadas por una mayor proporción de trabajadores informales y cuentapropistas, con niveles de educación, cal...
Este trabajo explora los cambios en la pobreza de ingresos en Argentina durante el período 2003-2015 utilizando diversas metodologías de descomposición. Los resultados sugieren que la mejora generalizada en el mercado laboral luego de la crisis fue el principal factor detrás de la fuerte caída de la pobreza en el período 2003-2007. En contraste, la...
We study the behavior of female labor force participation (LFP) over the business cycle by estimating fixed effects models at the country and population-group level, using data from harmonized national household surveys of 18 Latin American countries in the period 1987–2014. We find that female LFP follows a countercyclical pattern—especially in th...
This paper documents the evolution of wage differentials and the supply of workers by educational level for sixteen Latin American countries over the period 1991–2013. We find a pattern of rather constant rise in the relative supply of skilled and semi-skilled workers over the period. Whereas the returns to secondary education fell over time, in co...
In the nineties Argentina implemented a large education reform (Ley Federal de Educación - LFE) that mainly implied the extension of compulsory education in two additional years. The timing in the implementation substantially varied across provinces, providing a source of identification for unraveling the causal effect of the reform. The estimation...
In this paper, we use tax and household survey data to assess the history of income distribution in Argentina since the beginning of the 20th century. Until the 1970s, the country experienced a fall in inequality in spite of lower income growth. Since then, inequality has generally increased possibly as a result of large-scale shocks such as macroe...
The causes and consequences of the intergenerational persistence of inequality are a topic of great interest among various fields in economics. However, until now, issues of data availability have restricted a broader and cross-national perspective on the topic. Based on rich sets of harmonized household survey data, we contribute to filling this g...
In this paper, we estimate the impact on female labor force participation of a massive conditional cash transfer program—Universal Child Allowance, AUH—launched in Argentina in 2009. We identify the intention-to-treat effect by comparing eligible and non-eligible women over time through a diff-in-diff methodology. The results suggest a negative and...
In this paper we compute inequality measures over the distribution of a subjective well-being variable constructed from a life satisfaction question included in the Gallup World Poll in almost all countries in the world. We argue that inequality in subjective well-being may be a better proxy for the degree of unfairness in a society than income ine...
After half a century of sustained growth, female labor force participation has decelerated in Latin America, especially among married vulnerable women. Based on a large database of microdata from household surveys, this paper documents this recent deceleration and provides evidence on the determinants. We argue that the fast economic growth experie...
There is a belief that allowing communities monitoring power over providers could be beneficial for improving service delivery and reducing corruption in service delivery. In community monitoring interventions (CMIs), the community is given the opportunity to observe and assess providers’ performance and provide feedback to providers and politician...
After half a century of sustained growth, female labor force participation has decelerated in Latin America, especially among married vulnerable women. Based on a large database of microdata from household surveys, this paper documents this recent deceleration and provides evidence on the determinants. We argue that the fast economic growth experie...
In 2009 Argentina introduced a large poverty-alleviation program (AUH) that provides monthly cash transfers per child to households without workers in the formal sector. In this paper we study the potential unintended effect of this program on fertility. We apply a difference-in-difference strategy comparing the probability of having a new child am...
This Campbell systematic review assesses the effectiveness of community monitoring interventions in reducing corruption. The review summarises findings from 15 studies, of which seven are from Asia, six from Africa and two from Latin America.
Community monitoring interventions can reduce corruption. They also improve use of health services, but no...
After a decade of strong progress toward the goal of reducing the high levels of income disparities, there are clear signs of a deceleration in the pace of inequality reduction in Latin America. This paper argues that the deceleration is the result of two set of reasons. First, several of the driving factors of the fall in inequality in the 2000s h...
Fertility rates significantly fell over the last decades in Latin America. In order to assess the extent to which these changes contributed to the observed reduction in income poverty and inequality, we apply microeconometric decomposition to microdata from national household surveys from seven Latin American countries. We find that changes in fert...
This chapter reviews the empirical evidence on the levels and trends in income/consumption inequality and poverty in developing countries. It includes a discussion of data sources and measurement issues, evidence on the levels of inequality and poverty across countries and regions, an assessment of trends in these variables since the early 1980s, a...
In this review we expose the OECD Income Distribution Database to critical scrutiny, identifying its strengths and weaknesses. As it is almost inevitable in any critical assessment, we could not avoid being somewhat biased toward highlighting the limitations, without being similarly emphatic about the virtues of the database. To partly compensate f...
Este trabajo aporta evidencia sobre el empleo público en América Latina durante el período 1992-2012, explotando una base de datos estandarizados de las encuestas de hogares de todos los países de la región. Estas encuestas constituyen una buena herramienta por su representatividad nacional, su frecuencia y su amplia cobertura sobre cuestiones de e...
This paper provides evidence about the public employment in Latin America during the period 1992-2012, exploiting a standardized database of household surveys from all the countries of the region. These surveys constitute a useful tool because of their national representativeness, their frequency, and their wide coverage about employment and wage i...
One of the most salient socioeconomic changes over the last half-century has been the strong rise in female labor force participation across the world. Latin America has not been an exception. However, since the early 2000s, there are signs of a widespread and significant deceleration in women's entry into labor markets in Latin America. The slowed...
The recent Universal Child Allowance program in Argentina provides monthly cash transfers to unregistered workers with children. As the program is accessible only to those who are not in formal employment, it may discourage workers transitions to the formal sector. In this paper we estimate this effect by comparing the transitions to registered job...
In this paper we compute inequality measures over the distribution of a subjective welfare variable constructed from a question included in the Gallup World Poll in almost all countries in the world. We argue that inequality in subjective welfare may be a better proxy of the degree of unfairness in a society than income inequality. We find evidence...
En este trabajo se documenta y analiza la segregación escolar entre alumnos de distintos estratos socioeconómicos que asisten a escuelas públicas y privadas en América Latina. El trabajo contribuye con evidencia empírica a la medición de este fenómeno desde principios de los noventa hasta la actualidad. Los resultados sugieren que en promedio el gr...
En este trabajo se documenta y analiza la segregación escolar entre alumnos de distintos estratos
socioeconómicos que asisten a escuelas públicas y privadas en América Latina. El trabajo contribuye
con evidencia empírica a la medición de este fenómeno desde principios de los noventa hasta la
actualidad. Los resultados sugieren que en promedio el...
Labor informality is a pervasive characteristic of the labor markets in Latin America, and a central issue in the public policy debate. This paper discusses the concept of labor informality and implements alternative definitions using microdata from around 300 national household surveys in all Latin American countries. The analysis covers two decad...
This article takes advantage of a new source of information, the 2006 Gallup World Poll, to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC with other regions in the world. The Gallup survey has the advantage of being conducted in over 130 nations with almost...
The countries of Latin American have experienced strong transformations in their labor markets, which have had consequences in social and productive terms. Analyzing the labor market, and in particular the labor decisions, is important for a better understanding of the changes in poverty, inequality, productivity and growth in the region. This work...
This paper takes advantage of a new source of information – the Gallup World Poll 2006 – to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC estimates to those in other regions of the world. The Gallup survey has the advantage of being conducted in over 130 nat...
El objetivo de este trabajo es reseñar brevemente los métodos tradicionales de evaluación del impacto distributivo de las políticas públicas y discutir algunos de los avances más relevantes en los últimos veinte años. El trabajo se concentra en la evaluación de programas sociales, dejando de lado otras intervenciones públicas y su financiamiento. E...
El programa de Asignación Universal por Hijo en Argentina extiende a los desocupados y trabajadores informales un beneficio antes limitado a los empleados formales. Esta extensión podría modificar los incentivos laborales, estimulando una menor participación en el sector formal respecto de la que hubiese surgido en ausencia del programa. En este tr...
In the nineties Argentina implemented a large education reform (Ley Federal de Educación – LFE) that mainly implied the extension of compulsory education in two additional years. The timing in the implementation substantially varied across provinces, providing a source of identification for unraveling the causal effect of the reform. The estimation...
It has been argued that a factor behind the decline in income inequality in Latin America in the 2000s was the educational upgrading of its labor force. Between 1990 and 2010, the proportion of the labor force in the region with at least secondary education increased from 40 to 60 percent. Concurrently, returns to secondary education completion fel...
This paper studies school segregation among students from different socioeconomic strata attending public and private schools in Argentina. The study contributes with empirical evidence to the measurement of this phenomenon from 1986 to the present, including projections to 2014. To this end, all major household surveys conducted in the country are...
This paper studies school segregation among students from different socioeconomic strata attending public and private schools in Argentina. The study contributes with empirical evidence to the measurement of this phenomenon from 1986 to the present, including projections to 2014. To this end, all major household surveys conducted in the country are...
This paper studies poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean from a multidimensional perspective, exploiting the Gallup World
Poll, a survey that provides a unique opportunity to perform intercountry comparisons. By applying factor analysis we find
that welfare can be appropriately summarized by three dimensions: income, subjective welfare and “ba...
This paper provides original empirical evidence on the evolution of education inequality for all Latin American countries over the decades of 1990 and 2000. The analysis covers a wide range of issues on differences in educational outcomes and opportunities across the population, including inequality in years of education, gaps in school enrollment,...
En este trabajo se documenta y analiza la segregación escolar entre alumnos de distintos estratos socioeconómicos que asisten a escuelas públicas y privadas en Argentina. El trabajo contribuye con evidencia empírica a la medición de este fenómeno desde 1986 hasta la actualidad, incluyendo proyecciones hasta 2014. Para ello se utiliza información de...
This document presents a discussion of vulnerability estimates – defined as the risk of being poor in the future – in Latin American countries from both a conceptual and an empirical perspective, based on recent developments in the distributive literature. The document develops two main contributions. First, it presents cross-sectional vulnerabilit...
This paper estimates the distributional impact of the universal child allowances in Argentina a few months after their implementation. The study makes a contribution by estimating the potential direct impact of the program on a set of variables, including monetary poverty and inequality. The paper argues that the country has moved in the right dire...
This chapter documents the pattern of the rise and fall of income inequality in Latin America and comments on some plausible explanatory factors. After an overview of the regional trends and comparisons with other regions of the world, it focuses on three countries for which substantial analysis is available: Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The seco...
When the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were established in the early 1990s, achieving these in Argentina seemed a doable, though challenging enterprise. The fifteen years following 1990 (the reference year for the MDG targets) were characterized by great turbulence, with periods of growth, recession and profound social crisis. As a consequenc...
Este documento estudia el impacto distributivo del programa de asignaciones familiares universales a pocos meses de su implementaci�n. El trabajo contribuye con estimaciones de su potencial impacto directo sobre un conjunto de variables, incluyendo la pobreza y la desigualdad monetarias, y con la discusi�n de algunas opciones alternativas a la efec...