We offer a decomposition for the variance of the current unemployment rate that not only measures the contributions of labor market flows but also of the approximation error embedded in other decompositions that use surrogates for the current rate. Using data for the United States and Brazil,...

This article presents the results of an impact assessment of the Employment and Income Generation Program (Proger) - a loan program to small e medium sized firms conducted by the Brazilian government - on formal employment, payroll and unjustified dismissals. Two sources of data were used in the...

In this paper we pretend to compare the determinants of the time allocation of the teenagers among four Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile, Peru and Honduras. We assume there are four possibilities to time allocation: only studying, only working, doing both of them or doing none of them. We...

In this paper we evaluate the social programs that deals with worker protection. First we try to show which kind of incentives are induced by these programs. Then we check if the targeting correspond to the poor workers. The programs considered are: abono salarial, seguro-desemprego...

Using microdata of Brazilian firms from a longitudinal matched employee-employer data set (Rais) in the period from 1993 to 2013, this paper confirms that the middle part of the size distribution is "missing" in Brazil and apparently this feature is more intense than in other countries for which...

The functioning of the labor market can be represented by worker flows, and the fluctuation of these flows determines the fluctuation of unemployment. The literature measures the importance of a flow such as the proportion of the variance of long-term or stationary unemployment that is explained...

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a qualification program for young people in which training is fully offered by a group of potential employers. We perform this evaluation comparing such initiative to the Jovem Aprendiz Program, whose participants make up a pertinent control group in...

The goal of this paper is to offer an alternative procedure to deflate the income values in Brazil. We base our proposed index on the National Consumer Price Index (INPC) calculated by the Brazilian Census Bureau (IBGE). However we make three adjustments: a) change in the date around which the...

We implement decompositions of cyclical unemployment in a large developing country using the conventional 3-states and a 4-states representation of the labor market, where in the latter we subdivide the employment state into formal and informal forms of employment. This allows a richer analysis...

We evaluate the effects of a large-scale enforcement intervention on formal labor flows. The initiative combined a communication component (an official letter/e-mail sent to registered employers) and a punishment component (face-to-face inspections). Using two identification strategies...