Comparative Advantage, Segmentation and Informal Earnings: A Marginal Treatment Effects Approach

This paper employs recently developed econometric models of marginal treatment effects to analyze the relevance of labor market comparative advantage and segmentation in the participation and earnings performance of workers in formal and informal jobs in Argentina. A novel household data set on informality and self-employment and information on labor inspections targeting informal work was collected for this purpose. We account for endogeneity and selectivity issues in our estimations. Our results offer evidence for both comparative advantage and segmentation. No significant differences between the earnings of formal salaried workers and the self-employed are found, once accounted for positive selection bias into formal work. This is consistent with labor market comparative advantage considerations. On the contrary, informal salaried employment carries significant earnings penalties, alongside negative selection bias and modest positive sorting. These results are more consistent with segmentation.marginal treatment effects, occupational choice, segmentation, earnings, comparative advantage, informality, labor markets

Higher Education Decisions in Peru: On the Role of Financial Constraints, Skills, and Family Background

"This paper analyzes the relative importance of short term financial constraints vis a vis skills and other background factors affecting schooling decisions when explaining access to higher education in Peru. We focus on college access disparities between rich and poor households. We use a novel household survey that includes special tests to measure cognitive and non-cognitive skills of the urban population age 14-50. These are complemented with retrospective data on basic education and family socioeconomic conditions in a multinomial model. We find that strong correlation between college enrollment and family income in urban Peru is not only driven by credit constraints, but also by poor college readiness in terms of cognitive skills and by poor family and educational backgrounds affecting preferences for schooling. Family income explains, at most, half of the college access gap between poor and non-poor households. The other half is related to differences in parental education, educational background and cognitive skills. Our results indicate that credit and/or scholarship schemes alone will not suffice to change the regressive nature of higher education enrollment in Peru, and that such programs will face strong equity-efficiency trade-offs."Higher education, Cognitive skills, Non-cognitive skills, Credit constraints, Peru

Protocol de comunicació CAN

Aquest projecte està dividit en 3 parts. En la primera part s’explica una introducció del bus CAN: la historia del protocol, quan va ser publicat i per quin motiu; seguit dels objectius d’aquest projecte. En la segona part s’explica el protocol que implementa el bus CAN. Es començarà amb una breu descripció del bus i de les característiques més importants. A continuació s’explica el protocol més detalladament, començant amb la capa de més baix nivell fins a la capa d’enllaç de dades. En la tercera part s’explica el l’aplicació que s’ha desenvolupat i com s’ha implementat el bus CAN. Finalment es parlarà de les conclusions que s’ha arribat i les possibles línies futures per a darrers projectes

Sources of Income Persistence: Evidence from Rural El Salvador

This paper uses a unique panel dataset (1995-2001) of rural El Salvador to investigate the main sources of the persistence and variability of incomes. First we propose an econometric framework where a general dynamic panel model is validly reduced to a simple linear structure with a dynamic covariance structure, which augments considerably the number of degrees of freedom usually lost in the construction of instruments to estimate standard dynamic panel models. Then we investigate the extent to which families are continuously poor due to endowments (observed and unobserved) that yield low income potential or due to systematic income shocks that they are unable to smooth. We find that life-cycle incomes are largely explained by the relatively time-invariant productive characteristics of families and their members such as education, public goods and other assets. Observed income determinants account for about half of income persistence. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity leaves little room for pure state dependence. Although of second order, high volatility and the inability to insure from shocks is a more important source of variation in incomes than in developed countries. Low income potential is the more likely source of poverty traps in Rural El Salvador. Many of the family endowments are manipulable by policy interventions, although many not in the short term.Income mobility, Poverty Traps, Panel Data, El Salvador

RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION IN BOLIVIA: AN ESCAPE BOAT?

This paper studies rural-urban migration in Bolivia. Domestic migration usually works as an equalization mechanism, in which regions with fewer economic opportunities send migrants to more dynamic regions. We model the migration decision and take into account the possibility of self-selection for computing the returns to migration. We present selectivity corrected quantile regression models for earnings of both migrants and non-migrants in urban and metropolitan areas. We find that migrants receive a premium at low and median quantiles of the urban/metro conditional earnings distribution. This premium is somewhat diminished by a negative selectivity correction for migrants with lower probabilities of migration.

Are men benefiting from the new economy : male economic marginalization in Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica

The economies of Latin America have undergone extensive reforms, raising concerns about how these changes have affected the labor market. But there is also increasing concern that the reforms may have deeper social ramifications as the new economies strain the ability of certain groups of men to work and to earn good wages, fulfilling their traditional role as providers. Using household surveys broadly covering the period 1988-97 in urban areas of Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica, Arias examines the patterns of unemployment and real wage growth for distinct groups of male workers to see whether there is evidence of a deterioration in men's ability to be economically self-sufficient. He finds no general trend of male economic marginalization. The incidence and duration of unemployment have increased the most for the typically vulnerable group-young, less educated, informal sector workers-but the increased duration of unemployment hasalso affected older and more educated men. With respect to wages, density and quantile regression analysis indicates that the usual stories of wage marginalization of vulnerable workers can hardly explain the observed variety of wage growth patterns in the three countries. The positive wage performance has been concentrated mainly in the higher quantiles of the conditional wage distribution. This suggests that differences in unobservable worker characteristics, such as industriousness, labor market connections, and quality of schooling, have been key determinants of the ability of male workers in the region to adapt to economic restructuring. These results suggest that assistance should be targeted to some groups so that frustrations in asserting an economic identity do not lead to aggressive behavior. But they also show that we must look elsewhere for the roots of the increase in socially dysfunctional behavior.Labor Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Youth and Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research

Individual Heterogeneity in the Returns to Schooling: Instrumental Variables Quantile Regression using Twins Data

Considerable effort has been exercised recently in estimating mean returns to education while carefully considering biases arising from unmeasured ability and measurement error. Some of this work has also attempted to determine whether there are variations from the “mean” return to education across the population with mixed results. In this paper, we use recent extensions of instrumental variables techniques to quantile regression on a sample of twins to estimate an entire family of returns to education at different quantiles of the conditional distribution of wages while addressing simultaneity and measurement error biases. We test whether there is individual heterogeneity in returns to education against the alternative that there is a constant return for all workers. Our estimated model provides evidence of two sources of heterogeneity in returns to schooling. First, there is evidence of a differential effect by which more able individuals become better educated because they face lower marginal costs of schooling. Second, once this endogeneity bias is accounted for, our results provide evidence of the existence of actual heterogeneity in market returns to education consistent with a non-trivial interaction between schooling and unobserved abilities in the generation of earnings. The evidence suggests that higher ability individuals (those further to the right in the conditional distribution of wages) have higher returns to schooling but that returns vary significantly only along the lower quantiles to middle quantiles. In our final approach, the resulting estimated returns are never lower than 9 percent and can be as high as 13 percent at the top of the conditional distribution of wages, thus providing rather tight bounds on the true return to schooling. Our findings have meaningful implications for the design of educational policies.

Ressenyes

Index de les obres ressenyades: Ángel PRIOR OLMOS, Voluntad y responsabilidad en Hannah Arend

Sources of income persistence: evidence from rural El Salvador

Este trabajo utiliza una base de datos longitudinales única sobre zonas rurales en El Salvador (1995-2001) para investigar las fuentes principales de la persistencia y variabilidad del ingreso. Primero, proponemos un marco econométrico donde un modelo dinámico de paneles se simplifica a una estructura lineal con covarianza dinámica, lo cual aumenta la cantidad de grados de libertad usualmente perdidos en la construcción de instrumentos para estimar modelos dinámicos estándar. Segundo, investigamos el grado hasta donde las dotaciones (observadas y no observadas) determinan la persistencia de la pobreza, analizando si se debe a poca capacidad de generar ingreso o shocks continuos que no pueden suavizar. Encontramos que los ingresos de ciclo de vida están principalmente explicados por características productivas que no varían en el tiempo como: educación, bienes públicos y otros activos. Los determinantes observables explican la mitad de la persistencia del ingreso. Al controlar por heterogeneidad no observable deja poco lugar para pure state dependence. Aunque de segundo orden, la alta volatilidad y la inhabilidad de asegurarse en contra de riesgos parece ser una fuente importante de variación en los ingresos que en países desarrollados. La poca capacidad de generar ingreso es la fuente más probable de trampas de pobreza en áreas rurales salvadoreñas. Muchas de las dotaciones familiares son manipulables por intervenciones de política, aunque no en el corto plazo.This paper uses a unique panel dataset (1995-2001) of rural El Salvador to investigate the main sources of the persistence and variability of incomes. First we propose an econometric framework where a general dynamic panel model is validly reduced to a simple linear structure with a dynamic covariance structure, which augments considerably the number of degrees of freedom usually lost in the construction of instruments to estimate standard dynamic panel models. Then we investigate the extent to which families are continuously poor due to endowments (observed and unobserved) that yield low income potential or due to systematic income shocks that they are unable to smooth. We find that life-cycle incomes are largely explained by the relatively time-invariant productive characteristics of families and their members such as education, public goods and other assets. Observed income determinants account for about half of income persistence. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity leaves little room for pure state dependence. Although of second order, high volatility and the inability to insure from shocks is a more important source of variation in incomes than in developed countries. Low income potential is the more likely source of poverty traps in Rural El Salvador. Many of the family endowments are manipulable by policy interventions, although many not in the short term.Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS

Complicaciones Materno Fetales en pacientes con Ruptura Prematura de membrana mayor de 12 horas con embarazos de 28– 36 6/7 Semanas de Gestación que dan a luz en el Hospital Bertha Calderón Roque en el tercer trimestre del 2015

Se realizó un estudio observacional, retrospectivo, de tipo descriptivo y corte longitudinal en pacientes ingresados en la unidad de cuidados intensivos neonatales de Hospital Infantil Manuel de Jesús Rivera “La Mascota” que fueron sometidos a ventilación mecánica en el período del 1 de Enero al 31 de Diciembre de 2016. Se plantearon como objetivos el determinar cuál era el comportamiento clínico de los recién nacidos sometidos a ventilación mecánica, determinar las características generales de la población, identificar los factores relacionados a la ventilación mecánica y conocer cuáles eran las complicaciones asociadas a la ventilación más frecuentes que se presentaron. Entre los resultados encontramos que la mayoría de los pacientes eran de sexo masculino, el inicio de ventilación mecánica se estableció en el 61% de los casos en las primeras 72 horas de vida extrauterina, con un predominio de pacientes con edad gestacional a término y adecuado peso al nacer, entre las patologías de ingresos las de orden quirúrgico representaron el 52.6% de los casos siendo las tres principales: malformaciones de la pared abdominal, atresias gastrointestinales y malformaciones del sistema nervioso, mientras que las principales complicaciones que se presentaron fueron: broncoespasmo (24.9%), atelectasia (24.9%) y tubo selectivo (10.2%) y se determinó una mortalidad del 49.5