This paper analyzes the contribution of the minimum wage to the well documented rise in earnings inequality in Mexico between the late 1980s and the early 2000s. We find that a substantial part of the growth in inequality, and essentially all of the growth in inequality in the bottom end of the...

We conduct a field experiment to show that discrimination in the rental market represents a significant obstacle for the geographical assimilation process by immigrants. We employ the Internet platform to identify vacant rental apartments in different areas of the two largest Spanish cities,...

This paper studies gross worker flows to explain the rise in informality in Brazilian metropolitan labor markets from 1983 to 2002. In particular, we examine the impact of trade and constitutional reforms (that include increased firing costs, tighter restrictions on overtime work, and fewer...

Latin America and the Caribbean have become in the last decade or so a formidable laboratory for the design and implementation of innovative social policies. In the face of an unprecedented surge in the number of non-contributory social assistance benefit programs in the region, there is a...

This paper applies recent advances in the study of labor market dynamics to a representative developing country with a large unregulated of “informal” sector, Mexico. It finds, first, that the formal salaried sector shows the same procyclical job finding rate and mildly countercyclical...

This paper applies recent advances in the study of labor market dynamics to a representative developing country with a large unregulated of "informal" sector, Mexico. It finds, first, that the formal salaried sector shows the same procyclical job finding rate and mildly countercyclical...

The proportion of informal or unprotected workers in developing countries is large. In developing economies, the fraction of informal workers can be as high as 70% of total employment. For economies with significant informal sectors, business cycle fluctuations and labor market policy...

This paper discusses a set of statistics for examining and comparing labor market dynamics based on the estimation of continuous time Markov transition processes. It then uses these to establish stylized facts about dynamic patterns of movement using panel data from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico....

This paper studies the spatial dimension of growth in Mexico over the past three decades. The literature on regional economic growth shows a decrease in regional dispersion from 1970 to 1985, and a sharp increase afterward coinciding with the trade liberalization of the Mexican economy. Using...

Moving beyond the simple comparisons of averages typical of most analyses of household income shocks, this article employs quantile analysis to generate a complete distribution of such shocks by type of household during the 1995 crisis in Mexico. It compares the distributions across normal and...