Utilizing comprehensive administrative data from Brazil, we investigate the impact of peer effects on wages, considering both within-gender and cross-gender dynamics. Since the average productivity of both individuals and their peers is unobservable, we estimate these values using worker fixed effects while accounting for occupational and firm sorting. Our findings reveal that within-gender peer effects have approximately twice the influence of cross-gender peer effects on wages for both males and females. Furthermore, we observe a reduction in the disparity between these two types of peer effects in settings characterized by greater gender equality.

Firms market power may exacerbate income inequality. We investigate this relationship among firms in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), where this phenomenon remains understudied. We use firm-level data for formal firms in 16 countries in LAC and 31 peer economies with similar levels of GDP per capita but much less inequality. We study 1) The extent and dispersion of market power among LAC s firms compared to firms in peer economies; 2) the relationship between market power and the labor share of revenue at the firm level; and 3) the implications of that relationship for the aggregate labor share of income, which depends on the joint distribution (across firms) of market power, the labor share, and firms size. Markups (markdowns) measure product (labor) market power. Our results indicate that the average markup in the region is 20 percent above marginal costs, while average wages are 46 percent below the marginal revenue product of labor. The negative relationship at the firm level between the labor share and combined market power is driven by labor rather than product market power. Finally, we show that labor market power is more pronounced among larger firms, magnifying the effect of market power on the aggregate labor share and income distribution. However, there is no indication that market power is more acute or dispersed in LAC than in its peers, nor does it appear to induce more inequality than in those countries.

This study examines the redistributive preferences of Latin Americans and investigates the factors that shape them. Using a detailed survey in eight Latin American countries, the study sheds new light on redistributive preferences and explores which aspects of redistribution are more popular and among which groups. The roles of selfinterest, perceptions of inequality, values, and the relationship between citizens and the public sphere in shaping attitudes to redistribution are discussed.

A rapid expansion in demand for post-secondary education triggered an unprecedented boom in higher education programs in Colombia, raising concerns about their relevance and quality. This paper shows that the penalty on student learning and labor market outcomes of attending a recently created program is large but, to a large extent, it is driven by student and program selection. Using rich administrative data-sets that match higher education school admission information, socioeconomic characteristics of the young graduates, standardized test scores pre- and post-higher education, and formal labor market outcomes, we characterize this selection process by disentangling the relative roles of demand and supply forces. The main factor behind the learning penalty is student selection in baseline ability. In the case of labor market outcomes, the penalty is due to a combination of student and program characteristics.

This paper partially identifies population treatment effects in observational data under both non-random treatment assignment and sample selection. Bounds are provided for both average and quantile population treatment effects, combining assumptions for the selected and the non-selected subsamples. We show how different assumptions help narrow identification regions, and we illustrate our methods by partially identifying the effect of maternal education on the 2015 PISA math test scores in Brazil. We find that while sample selection increases considerably the uncertainty around the effect of maternal education, it is still possible to calculate informative identification regions.

We present new empirical evidence on the implications of minimum wages on employment in the uncovered sector in developing countries, analyzing a unique dataset assembled from a set of micro surveys collected in 49 low- and middle-income countries. Our identification strategy exploits relative bindingness in minimum wages across labor market groups within countries and across years. We find that a higher minimum wage is associated with a larger self-employment share. The estimated impact of the minimum wage on the uncovered sector is economically significant: a 1 percentage point increase in the minimum wage ratio is associated with 0.1 percentage points increase in the self-employment rate, 0.182 when the non-compliance rate with the minimum wage is taken into account.