Essays on Macroeconomics and Labor market
Essays;Macroeconomics;Labor;market
This doctoral thesis project is composed of three essays in Macroeconomics and Labor Markets. In the first essay, we propose a new measure of labor misallocation using identified administrative data on formal employment in Brazil (RAIS), disaggregated by observable worker characteristics such as gender and race. The model follows the structure of Hsieh and Klenow (2009), incorporating group-specific distortions to estimate deviations in labor allocation at the establishment level. In the second essay, we apply the measure developed in the first chapter to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic may have led to changes in inefficient labor allocation in Brazil. The pandemic is treated as an exogenous shock, with the occurrence of COVID-related deaths among formal workers in a given establishment serving as the treatment criterion. The goal is to identify how this health shock affected the composition and efficiency of the workforce within Brazilian firms in the post-pandemic period. Finally, the third essay analyzes the effects of the 2017 labor reform on labor misallocation and wage inequality. Using the degree of case backlog in the labor court system as a proxy for local institutional frictions, we examine whether the reform had heterogeneous effects depending on the judicial capacity of each region. The analysis focuses on how the institutional context shaped the reform’s impact on workforce composition and wage disparities across groups.