Job Market Paper
How does the minimum wage affect outsourced workers? Evidence from cleaning workers in Brazil
This paper provides causal evidence on the effect of implementing or increasing a wage floor (an occupation-specific minimum wage) on the wage difference between outsourced, insourced, and informal workers, the employment of outsourced and insourced workers, and the size of the informal labor market. To do so, I use matched employer-employee data from Brazil focusing on the labor market for cleaning workers. Brazil has regional occupation-specific wage floors that increased in response to yearly federal minimum wage increases that affected all regions and occupations starting in 2000. Since regions with lower wage floors were much more affected, to estimate the causal effect, I compare regions with lower wage floors in 1999 against regions with higher wage floors in 1999. Estimation results show that a 23% wage floor increase, the average real increase between 2000 and 2010, decreases the outsourced wage penalty in half. This reduction in the wage gap makes outsourced workers relatively more expensive than insourced workers, which reduces outsourcing employment by 70%. The majority of this reduction in outsourced worker employment comes from less entry of new outsourced workers or from workers transferring into formal jobs in other occupations, and only the minority comes from workers leaving the formal labor market. Finally, I find no significant effect on informal worker employment and a 40% reduction in the informal wage penalty.
Working Papers
The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States
(with Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade)
We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing the first five digits of more than 230 million of Social Security Numbers (SSN). By combining this part of the SSN together with year of birth, we identify whether individuals are immigrants based on the age at which their Social Security Number is assigned. We find immigrants represent 16 percent of all US inventors, but produced 23 percent of total innovation output, as measured by number of patents, patent citations, and the economic value of these patents. Immigrant inventors are more likely to rely on foreign technologies, to collaborate with foreign inventors, and to be cited in foreign markets, thus contributing to the importation and diffusion of ideas across borders. Using an identification strategy that exploits premature inventor deaths, we find that immigrant inventors create especially strong positive externalities on the innovation production of their collaborators, while natives have a much weaker impact. A simple decomposition illustrates that immigrants are responsible for 36% of aggregate innovation, two-thirds of which is due to their innovation externalities on their native-born collaborators
Women's Labor Market Participation in Brazil's Early Industrialization
In this paper, I estimate if the large influx of immigrants to Brazil between 1870 and 1920 contributed to the decline in women’s participation in manufacturing employment that happened during the same period. To do so, I assemble a novel country-wide data set that covers employment by gender and industry for the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Brazil. To estimate the
causal effect, I used a shift-share instrument similar to Card (2001). It predicts the influx of immigrants by assuming that immigrants of a specific nationality are more likely to settle in states that already have a large population from their home country. My results show that if the immigration rate were to increase by 28.83 percentage points (one standard deviation) the change in the proportion of women working
in manufacturing between 1872 and 1920 would have increased from -14.6 to -6.2 percentage points. This indicates that, counter-intuitively, the increase in immigration actually slowed down the decline in women’s labor force participation in manufacturing.
Work in Progress
The impact of outsourcing on firms' productivity
What is the impact of unions on workers welfare?
Teaching Experience
Section Evaluations
ECON101: Economic Policy Seminar
Introduction to Stata:
section handout;
section do-file
Regression review:
section handout;
section do-file
ECON102B: Applied Econometrics
Section handouts:
OLS;
F-tests;
Omitted Variable Bias
ECON106: World Food Economy
Section handout:
econ review
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