In 2006, the Bolsa Família Program completed its expansion, expecting to cover 11 million beneficiary families. The objective of this article is to evaluate whether this implied in deterioration in the program's efficient targeting and whether the target of 11 million families in fact covers...

Any discussion on professional training and labor market insertion must take into account the social vulnerability of the Brazilian population. Close to 16 million families fall within the criteria of Bolsa Familia`s Single Registry. Seventy-two (72) million people live in these families, but...

This text discusses the Bolsa Família Program, its institutional design, implementation issues, its impacts and possibilities for future evolution. We discuss the institutional division of responsibilities, benefits, conditionalities and federative arrangements. With regards to implementation...

This text argues that the criteria used to define Bolsa Família benefits and the criteria used to establish coverage targets are inconsistent. While individual concession criteria are that beneficiaries should be paid for two years if they do not suffer large upward income mobility, the...

This article measures the evolution of segregation by skill level among firms in the Brazilian formal labor market from 1996 to 2005. We define segregation as firms having a labor force composition by skill different from the labor market as a whole. We measure segregation using four different...

This text argues for higher Personal Income Tax levels. We show that, for all countries for which tax information is available, Brazil is the one in which Personal Income Tax collection as a percentage of the gross tax burden is the lowest. Personal Income Taxes account for about 6% of the Gross...

The effect of school inputs upon educational outcomes has been extensively studies in the literature but there are still no conclusions as to its impacts. This paper presents results that suggest a strong impact of inputs upon age-grade lag for Brazilian primary schools between 1998 and 2005. We...

The objective of this text is to analyze the changes in inequality of household per capita income distribution in Brazilian states between 2004 and 2006 and estimate how much of the change is due to non-contributory income transfers from the federal government: Programa Bolsa Família (PBF) and...

This discussion paper presents a methodology to visualize the effects of various influences on the income distribution. The methodology, although not new, has become very popular in the past few years. It is the method of counterfactual simulations. In other words, it is the use of "what if...

This text decomposes the earnings differential between white men, on the one hand, and black men, white women, and black women, on the other. A difference in earnings may arise due to at least three causes: difference in human capital, different insertions in the labor market, or pure difference...