EconomiA最新文献

This article analyses the effect of labor turnover on the productivity of Brazilian manufacturing firms between 1996 and 2013. We based our analysis on a theory of learning by doing, where turnover harms productivity by restricting the efficiency gains achieved by workers when they accumulate learning by producing in the same firm. We estimate a learning measurement that takes into account the loss of human capital—resulting from turnover—and its effect on total factor productivity (TFP). Our learning measurement is shown to be robust and has a consistent positive relationship with three different estimates of TFP.

This paper investigates the decrease in wage inequality among working age men in the Brazilian formal labor market by decomposing it into its permanent and transitory components. The permanent component refers to workers’ productivity characteristics such as education and abilities, whereas the transitory component relates to noise caused by economic instability. We use data from the Annual Reports of Social Information (RAIS) from 1994 to 2016, covering periods of both economic instability and stability. Our proposed model includes year and cohort specific effects in both components and we use minimum distance methods to estimate our parameters of interest. Overall we observe a downward trend in wage inequality levels for most cohorts during the entire period. However, different sources are associated with this decrease in different sub-periods. This decline can be attributed to reductions in the transitory component from 1994 to 2005 (related to the economic stabilization process) and in the permanent component from 2010 to 2016. Moreover, our results suggest that the permanent component has an important role in explaining the wage inequality level in Brazil, especially considering older cohorts, even though its share in terms of total variance has decreased over the 2010s. Finally, we show that age and education are accountable for a great share of permanent inequality, with this percentage being even greater for younger cohorts, although their relative importance also decreased over the years.

In this paper we seek to understand the recent dynamics of the Brazilian housing market, which experienced a significant growth in recent years. In particular, we assess the effects of aggregate productivity and monetary policy shocks on housing market variables. Moreover, we also investigate the effects of shocks to housing prices that are orthogonal to business cycle movements. We use a SVAR approach with sign restriction backed by a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model estimated for Brazil. The empirical results show that the housing market responds positively to aggregate productivity shocks, while a contractionary monetary policy shock depress housing output, demand and prices. Additionally, we find monetary policy as an important source of variation in housing prices and financing, while productivity shocks explain a substantial share of housing production movements. We also show that the behavior of housing prices is mostly driven by shocks to housing prices that are orthogonal to business cycles movements.

This paper aims to estimate the inequalities of educational opportunities of 5th and 9th-grade students in Brazil and its states, verifying the relative contribution of each analyzed variable to this inequality. For this purpose, we used the new methodology developed by Ferreira and Gignoux (2014) considering the data of standardized tests of proficiency in Portuguese Language and Mathematics. Overall, the results show that more than 15% of the inequality of educational opportunities in Brazil is explained by circumstances unrelated to individual effort. The poorest regions of Brazil are also those with the highest inequality of educational opportunities and the circumstances with the greatest power to explain inequalities being parental education and socioeconomic status.

The main purpose of this article is to analyze the capacity of Brazilian economy sectors to transfer their productivity gains over the productive chain from 2000 to 2009. Therefore, it has been used structural decomposition technique and a methodology that deals with the variation of labor productivity. The results of this article yield in the period under review are that the Services and not the Industry were the responsible for transmitting these increments of productivity. However, the power of transmission of productivity variation of the tertiary sector comes to be relatively low when compared to the ability of the Industry to transmit its productivity variations.

A number of researchers and policymakers have revealed the short- and medium-term impacts of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs; however, accumulation of full-scale evaluations of their long-term impact is ongoing. To contribute to filling the gap, this study empirically examines the vulnerability of rural households in Mexico and how CCT has recently impacted them. Using two Mexican rural household panel datasets from the 2000s, I adopt Kurosaki’s (2006) version of Townsend’s (1994) risk-sharing model with instrumental variable methods, which enables a greater focus on household welfare decline. The empirical results confirm that CCT played a certain role in reducing household vulnerability in the 2000s; however considering the situation after the global crisis in 2008 and the exact mechanism through which this occurs remains subject to further examination.

This study aims to analyze the contribution of the minimum wage valorization policy to the reduction in poverty that occurred in the first decade of the 21st century in Brazil, considering not only the incidence of poverty but also its intensity and severity. A decomposition methodology was used to isolate the marginal contribution of the minimum wage in the observed changes, taking into account the roles of setting the values of basic pension and social assistance benefits (the Benefício de Prestação Continuada or BPC) in addition to setting the wage floor. Between 2002 and 2013, the minimum wage contributed to a 38.2% reduction in the proportion of impoverished people, a 39.4% reduction in the intensity of poverty and 40.6% decrease in the severity of poverty. Our results also reveal geographic differences, with the minimum wage being more important in the poorest regions.

We estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for a first-order stochastic reduction on the risk of robbery at a large city in Brazil. We develop a structural choice model that nests a process of contingent valuation among non-degenerate lotteries and estimate it by both maximum likelihood and geographically weighted regression (GWR) using a dataset from the city of Fortaleza that contains a precise measurement of individual's subjective probability of victimization among detailed socioeconomic measurement, willingness to pay, and police presence variables. Expected loss, gender, age, education, and perception of patrolling explain WTP. Our global model estimated a mean WTP of R$ 19.23 (U$ 10.33) per month. Our local model, estimated by GWR, suggests that there is a reasonable amount of spatial heterogeneity that follows the city's socioeconomic spatial distribution profile. Although the city's northwest periphery presents higher WTP, as long as we go inwards, there is plenty of heterogeneity on its spatial distribution. Our results support a theory of crime with an active role for victim's (costly) precautions influenced by socioeconomic spatial heterogeneity.

Water is a key input to agricultural production and therefore fluctuations in water availability may impact agricultural productivity and revenue. Climate science tells us that most of these fluctuations are increasingly resulting from intra-year, instead of interyearly, shifts in the timing and intensity of rainfall. Consequently predictions of the economic effects of these fluctuations would likely differ depending on how these shifts are taken into account by the empirical models. To investigate this, the present paper introduces a novel hydro-economic model in which the timing and intensity of rainfall affect the productivity of a partially irrigated agricultural system in Brazil. The specification of the production function is designed to reflect intra-year, in a monthly or seasonal basis, and interyearly shifts on rainfall to show how the opportunity cost of supplementary irrigation supply varies with changes in the timing and intensity of rainfall. Results suggest that the timing of rainfall is indeed an important economic variable and models that take into account shifts only on a yearly basis will tend to underestimate the impacts of water scarcity on agricultural income.

The search for psychological content or support for economic decision-making is a subject that is contemporaneously stressed. Considering Keynesian and Post-Keynesian economics, it is possible to perceive several approaches that reclaim behavioral economics as a psychological support for decision-making. This study follows a different procedure. It points out the psychological issues studied by Keynes and introduces psychological theories that analyze these issues in order to emphasize psychological support for Keynes’s approach to decision-making. In doing so, this study relies on the role of observation, cognition, and imagination in the Keynesian perspective on decision-making.