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on Central and South America |
|
Issue of 2021‒09‒20
seven papers chosen by |
| By: | Ferreira, Francisco H G; Firpo, Sergio P; Messina, Julián |
| Abstract: | The Gini coefficient of labor earnings in Brazil fell by nearly a fifth between 1995 and 2012, from 0.50 to 0.41. The decline in other measures of earnings inequality was even larger, with the 90-10 percentile ratio falling by almost 40 percent. Applying micro-econometric decomposition techniques, this study parses out the proximate determinants of this substantial reduction in earnings inequality. Although a falling education premium did play a role, in line with received wisdom, this study finds that a reduction in the returns to labor market experience was a much more important factor driving lower wage disparities. It accounted for 53 percent of the observed decline in the Gini index during the period. Reductions in horizontal inequalities – the gender, race, regional and urban-rural wage gaps, conditional on human capital and institutional variables – also contributed. Two main factors operated against the decline: a greater disparity in wage premia to different sectors of economic activity, and the “paradox of progress”: the mechanical inequality-increasing effect of a more educated labor force when returns to education are convex. |
| Keywords: | earnings inequality; Brazil; returns to experience; OUP deal |
| JEL: | D31 J31 |
| Date: | 2021–03–25 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:110471&r= |
| By: | Francesca Caselli; Matilde Faralli; Paolo Manasse; Ugo Panizza |
| Abstract: | This paper studies whether countries benefit from servicing their debts during times of widespread sovereign defaults. Colombia is typically regarded as the only large Latin American country that did not default in the 1980s. Using archival research and formal econometric estimates of Colombia's probability of default, we show that in the early 1980s Colombia's fundamentals were not significantly different from those of the Latin American countries that defaulted on their debts. We also document that the different path chosen by Colombia was due to the authorities' belief that maintaining a good reputation in the international capital market would have substantial long-term payoffs. We show that the case of Colombia is more complex than what it is commonly assumed. Although Colombia had to re-profile its debts, high-level political support from the US allowed Colombia do to so outside the standard framework of an IMF program. Our counterfactual analysis shows that in the short to medium run, Colombia benefited from avoiding an explicit default. Specifically, we find that GDP growth in the 1980s was higher than that of a counterfactual in which Colombia behaved like its neighboring countries. We also test whether Colombia's behavior in the 1980s led to long-term reputational benefits. Using an event study based on a large sudden stop, we find no evidence for such long-lasting reputational gains. |
| JEL: | F34 F32 H63 |
| Date: | 2021–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1163&r= |
| By: | Camilo A. Cepeda-Francese (El Colegio de México); Aurora A. Ramírez-Álvarez (El Colegio de México) |
| Abstract: | This paper assesses how the adoption of a common-law style model affects crime rates, pre-trial detention, and judicial efficiency measures. We do this in the context of Mexico, where a judicial reform was fully implemented by 2016, both on the state and federal levels. Using a generalized synthetic control group approach (Xu, 2017) and municipality-level administrative data for the years 1997-2012, we find that the reform increased the homicide rate and was accompanied by a reduction in the use of pretrial detention for property crimes and rape, and a more rapid process for some types of crimes. The increase in the homicide rate was, nonetheless, specific to municipalities with established organized crime presence, where we observed a reduction in the capacity to effectively prosecute homicides linked to the reform. Our results describe the difficulties in implementing this kind of reform in developing countries experiencing security crises, and they contribute to the literature linking procedural justice and criminal behavior. |
| Keywords: | Crime, Criminal Justice Reform, Generalized Synthetic Control Group, Latin America |
| JEL: | K14 K40 K41 K42 |
| Date: | 2021–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:emx:ceedoc:2021-06&r= |
| By: | Monserrat Serio (Universidad Nacional de Cuyo) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the inequality of opportunity in education among students from Argentina. We examine the student’s achievement in mathematics and reading. We use Aprender assessment database and we estimate a counterfactual distribution of educational outcomes conditional to the students’ circumstances and we compute inequality of opportunity indexes. The results suggest that educational inequality is low but a relevant proportion of this inequality is related to circumstances. Indeed, inequality of opportunity accounts for up to 30 percent of the inequality in educational outcomes. The most relevant circumstances shares are the socioeconomic level and the parent’s education. |
| Keywords: | desigualdad de oportunidades; educación; Argentina |
| JEL: | D30 I24 I31 |
| Date: | 2021–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aoz:wpaper:86&r= |
| By: | Eduardo Levy Yeyati (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella/The Brookings Institution); Federico Favata (CIMaD - EEyN UNSAM); Martín Montané (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella); Daniel Schteingart (Centro de Estudios para la Producción) |
| Abstract: | Este trabajo presenta una primera aproximación al panorama presente y la evolución reciente del mercado de trabajo en la Argentina que nos permita poner en contexto el debate de las políticas de empleo de cara al futuro, y está basado en la información públicamente disponible. Para datos internacionales, las fuentes son la Organización Internacional del Trabajo (OIT) y la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económico (OCDE). Para datos locales, usamos la Encuesta Permanente de Hogares (EPH) en su modalidad continua (que se inicia en 2003) y, en menor medida, el Observatorio de Empleo y Dinámica Empresarial del Ministerio de Trabajo, Empleo y Seguridad Social (OEDE-MTEySS), la Cuenta de Generación del Ingreso (CGI) del INDEC y estimaciones propias de la OIT. |
| Date: | 2021–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aoz:wpaper:82&r= |
| By: | Nicolás Garrido (Universidad Diego Portales); Jeffrey Morales (Universidad de las Américas) |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the effect that government spending has on income distribution in Chile. The analysis is carried out by computing the Chilean Social Accounting Matrix for the year 2016 with 41 institutions. The results obtained show that households with higher income have a lower elasticity of income to government expenditure than lower-income households. The high elasticity in higher incomes is consequence of the high stake of income and the high elasticity of the low-income households is consequence of a poor participation on the income distribution. Thus, when the effects on the households is measured by its nominal impact, the highest income household receives 10 times more income than lowest income household as consequence of the fiscal expenditure. Using counterfactual simulations it is shown that this regressive effect of government spending has its origin in the unequal distribution of personal income made by markets. |
| Keywords: | Income Distribution; Social Accounting Matrix; Chile; Multiplier Mode |
| Date: | 2021–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:aoz:wpaper:84&r= |
| By: | Onil Banerjee (IDB); Martín Cicowiez (CEDLAS-IIE-FCE-UNLP) |
| Abstract: | En este trabajo, se describe el procedimiento que, utilizando los cuadros de oferta y utilización recientemente publicados por el INDEC, seguimos para la construcción de una Matriz de Contabilidad Social (MCS) para Argentina para el año 2018. La MCS resultante identifica 107 actividades, 223 productos, 11 factores de producción – incluyendo tres categorías de trabajo --y 6 hogares representativos. La MCS se construyó para ser utilizada como insumo para la calibración de IEEM (Integrated Economic-Environmental Modeling Platform), un modelo de equilibrio general computable extendido para considerar las interacciones, de ida y vuelta, entre la economía y el medio ambiente. |
| JEL: | E16 C68 |
| Date: | 2021–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dls:wpaper:0287&r= |