This study argues that the political considerations were an important factor behind the crisis of the Brazilian real in January 1999. The divided coalition government and a president facing impending elections eschewed the correction of external misalignments and the fiscal austerity at a time...

A national minimum wage cannot explain variation in wages or employment across regions. Identification of the effect of the minimum wage separately from the effect of other variables on wages or employment requires regional variation. Many minimum wage variables with regional variation have been...

There is very little empirical evidence on the effects of the minimum wage on prices in the international literature and none whatsoever for developing countries. This paper estimates the minimum wage price effect using monthly Brazilian household and firm data from 1982 to 2000 aggregated at a...

The minimum wage literature is very limited on empirical evidence for developing countries. This already limited literature is even more limited on the effects of the minimum wage in the informal sector, where most of the poor are. Extending the understanding of minimum wage effects both in...

This paper puts together evidence for the wages, employment and price effects of the minimum wage. This overall picture will help to understand the small employment effects prevalent in the literature in the light of price effects. The data used is an under-explored monthly Brazilian household...

Information flows across international financial markets typically occur within hours, making volatility spillover appear contemporaneous in daily data. Such simultaneous transmission of variances is featured by the stochastic volatility model developed in this paper, in contrast to usually...

Tracking individual workers across employers and industries after Brazil's trade liberalization in the 1990s shows that foreign import penetration and tariff reductions trigger worker displacements but that neither comparative-advantage industries nor exporters absorb displaced workers for...

The informal sector plays an important role in the functioning of labor markets in emerging economies. To characterize better this highly heterogeneous sector, we conduct a distributional analysis of the earnings gap between informal and formal employment in Brazil, Mexico and South Africa,...

A large body of empirical literature indicates that, contrary to predictions from economic theory, wages in the informal sector increase after any minimum wage hike. This phenomenon was so far explained as a byproduct of a signal conveyed by statutory minimum wages to wage setting in the...