Cash-on-hand in Developing Countries and the Value of Social Insurance: Evidence from Brazil

This paper first exploits a "bonus" policy providing low-income workers with cash grants in Brazil to study the effect of liquidity provision on unemployment outcomes. Based on a RD Design, I find that granting unemployed workers with a bonus equal to half of their previous monthly earnings decreases the probability of exiting unemployment within 8 weeks by around 0.65%. Second, by exploiting the UI potential duration schedule, I find that granting workers with an extra month of unemployment benefits decreases the same outcome by 1.9%. Then, theoretical results from Landais (2014) are used to combine these estimates and disentangle liquidity and moral hazard effects of UI. Based on these, I estimate the liquidity-to-moral hazard ratio in Brazil to be as large as 98%, similarly to values previously found in the US. It suggests that, contrary to common belief, providing UI in developing countries with large informal labor markets may yield substantial welfare gains

Unemployment Insurance and the Duration of Employment: Evidence from a Regression Kink Design

Can the potential availability of unemployment insurance (UI) affect the behavior of employed workers and the duration of their employment spells? I apply a regression kink design (RKD) to address this question using linked employer-employee data from the Brazilian labor market. Exploiting the UI schedule, I find 1% higher potential benefit level increases job duration by around 0.3%. Such result is driven by the fact that higher UI decreases the probability of job quits, which are not covered by UI in Brazil. These estimates are robust to permutation tests and a number of falsification tests. I develop a simple model to assess the economic relevance of this finding. It shows that the positive effect on employment duration implies that the optimal benefit level is higher than otherwise. More importantly, the model delivers a simple welfare formula based on sufficient statistics which can be easily linked to the data. A simple calibration exercise shows that this elasticity impacts welfare with a similar magnitude to the well-known elasticity of unemployment duration to benefit level

Catálogo Taxonômico da Fauna do Brasil: setting the baseline knowledge on the animal diversity in Brazil

The limited temporal completeness and taxonomic accuracy of species lists, made available in a traditional manner in scientific publications, has always represented a problem. These lists are invariably limited to a few taxonomic groups and do not represent up-to-date knowledge of all species and classifications. In this context, the Brazilian megadiverse fauna is no exception, and the Catálogo Taxonômico da Fauna do Brasil (CTFB) (http://fauna.jbrj.gov.br/), made public in 2015, represents a database on biodiversity anchored on a list of valid and expertly recognized scientific names of animals in Brazil. The CTFB is updated in near real time by a team of more than 800 specialists. By January 1, 2024, the CTFB compiled 133,691 nominal species, with 125,138 that were considered valid. Most of the valid species were arthropods (82.3%, with more than 102,000 species) and chordates (7.69%, with over 11,000 species). These taxa were followed by a cluster composed of Mollusca (3,567 species), Platyhelminthes (2,292 species), Annelida (1,833 species), and Nematoda (1,447 species). All remaining groups had less than 1,000 species reported in Brazil, with Cnidaria (831 species), Porifera (628 species), Rotifera (606 species), and Bryozoa (520 species) representing those with more than 500 species. Analysis of the CTFB database can facilitate and direct efforts towards the discovery of new species in Brazil, but it is also fundamental in providing the best available list of valid nominal species to users, including those in science, health, conservation efforts, and any initiative involving animals. The importance of the CTFB is evidenced by the elevated number of citations in the scientific literature in diverse areas of biology, law, anthropology, education, forensic science, and veterinary science, among others

The employment effects of lump-sum and contingent job insurance policies: evidence from Brazil

Lump-sum job displacement policies (e.g. severance pay) are often presented as a better alternative to contingent policies (e.g. unemployment insurance) in the context of developing countries, under the rationale that the former are less harmful to formal employment as they do not incentivize substitution from formal to informal jobs. First, this paper provides original evidence on the employment effects of lump-sum income in the context of a developing country with high labor informality. Using Brazilian data, a regression discontinuity (RD) design shows that a transfer equivalent to 15 days of earnings (i) increases the duration out of a formal job by 1.9 weeks, (ii) reduces monthly earnings in the next job by 1.6%, and (iii) reduces total earnings in the formal labor market by 3.6% over a three-year period. Second, the paper studies the impact of a one-month extension in unemployment insurance (UI) on a comparable sample of displaced workers. UI is shown to have a stronger impact on the duration out of a formal job compared with a lump-sum transfer. In addition, a novel exercise matching administrative and survey data shows that 57% of the decrease in formal employment caused by UI is compensated by an increase in the incidence of informal employment. However, workers receiving the UI extension partially recover the initial employment loss over time in such a way that the adverse impact on employment over a three-year period is similar compared with the lump-sum transfer. Moreover, UI is found to be less harmful to re-employment wages, possibly because it improves the worker’s bargaining power as it offers insurance against the duration of joblessness. Overall, the UI extension is less detrimental to total earnings in the formal labor market over a three-year period. Hence, although these findings indicate that contingent job insurance policies have a stronger impact on the initial duration out of a formal job and indeed incentivize informal employment, they do not support the notion that lump-sum policies are less harmful to formal employment and earnings in the medium term

Corruption and legislature size: evidence from Brazil

This paper studies whether and how legislatures affect political corruption. Using a regression discontinuity design in the context of Brazilian municipalities, we find a positive causal impact of council size on corruption levels, as detected by random federal audits. This indicates that an extra councilor represents an additional political actor potentially interested in diverting public resources, which we define as a rent extraction effect. However, we find further evidence that, in some contexts, larger councils enhance the representation of opposition parties and effectively increase monitoring over the executive, attenuating the rent extraction effect. Namely, in municipalities where opposition parties are typically underrepresented, the additional seat in the council is absorbed by the opposition and corruption outcomes do not worsen. In addition, only in such context, mayors are more commonly sentenced for misconduct in office by judicial authorities, whose investigations anecdotally often originates from councilors denouncing mayors to local courts. Overall, our findings show that legislature size is detrimental to corruption outcomes but less so where the representation of opposition parties improves with the enlargement of the legislature