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Evidence from Brazil shows how affirmative action students in the higher education system adjust their behaviour to catch up with initially higher-performing privileged students.Affirmative action (AA) policies, aiming to address historical inequalities and promote social justice, have sparked...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Mismatch effects and catch-up dynamics under a Brazilian college affirmative action program
Affirmative action in higher education can lead to mismatch, where students admitted through preferential treatment struggle academically due to inadequate preparation before college. Although some students may face initial challenges, by providing access to quality education for talented...
Journal Article
– Evidence from a top university in Brazil
Using two rich administrative data sets and a rule of admission at one top university in Brazil that splits students into two classes, we apply a regression discontinuity design to study the effect of class allocation on academic performance and labor market outcomes. The last student of the first...
Book Chapter
– Insights from Brazil
A concern with absolute poverty, defined as a money-metric measure of the ability to meet basic subsistence needs, has occupied a central place within the international development agenda for much of its existence. Efforts in recent years to promote a more multidimensional understanding of poverty...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from a government-sponsored scholarship program in Brazil
This paper investigates the impact of the Science without Borders (Ciência sem Fronteiras – CSF) programme on participants’ post-graduation enrolment, employment, and entrepreneurship. The programme was launched in 2011 to increase students’ human capital and interest in science and postgraduate...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Tasks, Skills, and Institutions
Working Paper
pdf
This paper studies the unintended long-run effects of a permanent agricultural shock led by agro-terrorism in Brazil on the education and labour market. We explore the witches' broom outbreak in cocoa farms in the world's second most important cocoa production region until 1989, the southeast of...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Empirical evidence suggests that the social effects of internal migration may be substantially different from those associated with the arrival of international migrants. In this study the author provides the first evidence of the effect of internal migration on crime with longitudinal data from...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from the regulation of junkyards in Brazil
I describe how monitoring and harsher law enforcement reduce the expected economic benefits of crime. I investigate the effect of shifts in legal authorities’ surveillance by focusing on junkyards, firms often associated with illegal markets and auto theft. Starting in 2014, many municipalities in...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– The role of trade and labour policies on informality
Part of Journal Special Issue
What sustains informality
Working Paper
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– Insights from Brazil’s social protection system
Policy frames in Brazil have long run up against conflicting visions and understandings about the causes and consequences of group-based inequality. This paper argues that a class-based lens has dominated the social protection framework. In recent years, political leaders have framed social policy...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– The case of Brazil
From the book:
The Developer’s Dilemma
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Brazilian electronic biddings
Using big data from the Brazilian public procurement system, this research aims to investigate what factors are associated with the occurrence of anticompetitive practices in electronic bidding. Our analysis considers all services contracted between 2014 and 2017. The study uses the logit regression...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from a top university in Brazil
Affirmative action in higher education may lead to mismatch, a situation where students benefiting from preferential admission struggle with their college-level work because of poor pre-college academic preparation. In the United States, those students can switch majors if they underperform in the...
Working Paper
pdf
– A descriptive analysis
In this paper we use different sources of data on job task content to investigate the importance of occupations and the intensity of routine tasks embodied in them in explaining changes in employment and earnings in Brazil, in particular their relation with earnings and polarization, and inequality...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from a top university in Brazil
Peers play an essential role in cognitive and non-cognitive skills formation. Ordinal rank may also change incentives and environment, impacting students’ efforts. Using two rich administrative data sets and a rule of admission at one top university in Brazil, we apply a regression discontinuity...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from a high-dosage programme in Brazil
Using admission lotteries and registry data linking labour market outcomes, we study the effect of a vocational training programme focused on disadvantaged individuals in Brazil. The intensive programme is an 18-month classroom training coupled with a 6-month on-the-job training provided by...
Working Paper
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– A decomposition approach
The purpose of this article is to provide new evidence about the sources of regional income inequalities in Brazil along the wage distribution, taking into account the regional differentials in purchasing power. We use a unique and recent regional purchasing power index to adjust nominal values of...
Blog
Globalization has generally coincided with a rise in work outside the formal economy, intensifying job precarization — when high-quality, formal jobs that entitle workers to benefits are replaced by jobs which may not comply with regulations and offer fewer benefits. In a recent study of the impacts...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– What are the main drivers of income distribution changes in the new millennium?
From the book:
Inequality in the Developing World
Working Paper
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Several episodes of market-oriented reforms in developing countries have been accompanied by a significant rise in work outside of the formal economy. This paper investigates whether the impact of increased exposure to trade on formal employment is mediated by the strength of labour regulations. We...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from Brazil
Traditional economic models predict rural to urban migration during the structural transformation of an economy. In middle-income countries, it is less clear which direction of migration to expect. In this article, the author shows that in Brazil as many people move out as into metropolitan cities...
Working Paper
pdf
– The case of BRICS
As the world battles with the triple problems of social, economic, and environmental challenges, it has become important to focus both policy and research efforts on these. Therefore, this study examines the effect of wealth inequality on CO2 emissions in five emerging economies: Brazil, Russia...
Working Paper
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– Trade liberalization and the rise of populism in Brazil
This paper investigates the long-term impact of economic shocks on populism, by exploiting a natural experiment created by the trade liberalization process implemented in Brazil between 1990 and 1995. This high impact and low duration event generated a profound shock to the economy with, we argue...
Working Paper
pdf
– The case of Brazil
Through rapid urbanization, Brazil—previously a country where most workers were in the agricultural sector—went through a strong process of structural transformation that lasted almost four decades until economic liberalization at the beginning of the 1990s. During the same period, income inequality...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from a public federal university in Brazil
Can students’ rank in the ability distribution of their class impact their academic achievement? We aim to answer this question using a discontinuity generated by a rule for the distribution of students between classes at a prestigious Brazilian university. The rule means that in almost 30 per cent...
Working Paper
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– Where they move and why prices matter
Traditional economic models predict rural to urban migration during the structural transformation of an economy. In middle-income countries, it is less clear which direction of migration to expect. In this paper I show that in Brazil as many people move out of as into metropolitan cities, and they...
Working Paper
pdf
Empirical evidence suggests that the social effects of internal migration may be substantially different from those associated with the arrival of international migrants. In this paper, I provide the first evidence of the effect of internal migration on crime with longitudinal data from Brazilian...
Access to effective social insurance in Latin America is typically determined by workers’ status in the labor market – whether they have formal or informal jobs. This column explains why the separate systems constitute a bad economic and social policy. The author calls for a shift towards universal...
Income inequality is the result of complex processes with multiple interacting driving forces but understanding those drivers in emerging economies is particularly difficult because of data and analytical challenges. While most middle-income countries produce comprehensive household surveys these...
– Inclusive growth trend of this millennium is over
After three decades of persistently high inequality, Brazil has been experiencing a downward trend since 2001, accompanied by a rise in household incomes. These trends lasted until 2014 when a major reversal took place on both fronts. Since the 1970s Brazil has been one of the most unequal countries...
Working Paper
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After three decades of persistently high income inequality, from 2001 Brazil experienced a downward inequality trend followed by rising household income growth. Both movements lasted until 2015. This work synthesizes the results of six papers, describing Brazilian income distribution trends and...
Working Paper
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– The role of firms, education, and top incomes 1994–2015
This paper documents the evolution and the determinants of earnings inequality in the Brazilian formal sector from 1994 to 2015, using establishment level data. In 2015, schooling explained 33 per cent of overall inequality. Firm-specific effects explain 65 per cent of total inequality level and 76...
Working Paper
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We study the trajectory of the gender gap over time and over the life cycle, using a matched employer-employee data from the formal labour market in Brazil. We document the evolution of participation and earnings for both males and females during the period 1994–2015 and the gender earnings gap...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Female Autonomy and Women’s Welfare
Working Paper
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– Combining surveys and income tax data in Brazil
This paper evaluates the impacts of combining household surveys with income tax return files, in terms of growth, inequality, and social welfare in Brazil from 2007 to 2015. This exercise holds the promise of adding more realistic top income values to traditional surveys. While the previous...
Working Paper
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– Dynamic microsimulation, 2003–15
This paper assesses causes and consequences of fiscal redistribution in Brazil. The framework proposed allows evaluating in an integrated manner the impacts of government-sponsored actions in inequality and mean income changes on social welfare, addressing both static and dynamic implications. To...
Working Paper
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Education-related changes are often argued as the main reasons for changes in earnings distribution. However, omitted variable and measurement error biases possibly affect econometric estimates of these effects. Brazil experienced a sharp fall of individual labour income inequality between 1996 and...
Working Paper
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This paper develops a new imputation methodology applied to missing incomes values in PNAD. PNAD is the main Brazilian household survey, but it has no imputation. The imputation process starts by fitting regression models applied to different income sources considering the complex sampling design of...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Patterns, trends, and their impacts on institutions
Part of Journal Special Issue
Horizontal Inequality: Persistence and Change
Working Paper
pdf
– Insights from Brazil
Concerns about the dramatic rise in income inequality across the world and, at the same time, assessments of national progress on the Millennium Development Goals made it clear that it is the intersection of income inequality, marginalized social identities and, very often, locational disadvantage...
Book Chapter
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
From the book:
Growth, Employment, and Poverty in Latin America
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book examines the links between economic growth, changing employment...
Working Paper
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– Brazil and the Vale SA model of corporate interaction
Reflection about the role of corporate social investment in Brazil, associated with the presence of a large economic enterprise, is the major stimulus of this paper. It seeks to present how cross-sector governance can contribute to the social development of a city and how this process can be led by...
Working Paper
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Over the last half-century, the role of women in society has changed substantially. However, the gender income gap and the difference in labour force participation persist. Akerlof and Kranton introduce the concept of identity from sociology and social psychology at the economic analysis; based on...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Brazilian politicians
What explains the persistence of racial or ethnic inequalities in political representation, in the absence of strongly politicized racial or ethnic cleavages? This paper uses new data to demonstrate a substantial racial gap between voters and politicians in Brazil. We show that this disparity is not...
Working Paper
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In this paper, we analyse the patterns and trends of group-based inequalities in Brazil in the past 30 years. Using data from the last four demographic censuses (1980, 1991, 2000, and 2010), we estimate numerous measures to analyse inequalities between different ‘ethnic’ groups. Our results show...
Displaying 48 of 160 results