Research

I use a large merger to study the effects of a concentration on labor market outcomes. I find that concentration lowers wages, but the effects are different than prior estimates in the literature. I observe a larger reduction in wages of salespeople (low skill) than pharmacists (high skill). Two hypotheses can explain the results: (i) salespeople have strong preferences for jobs or accumulate some industry-specific human capital, and (ii) pharmacists are better organized into unions. Previous studies do not account for changes in labor force composition that are relevant after a merger, which could explain the difference in estimates. I show that changes in labor force composition within establishments are common in the economy over time. 

Recent studies suggest that the increasing supply of college-educated workers in Latin American countries has negatively impacted returns to skill over the last two decades, as evidenced by the decreasing college premium. In this paper, we show that changes in the college premium do not accurately represent shifts in returns to skill, particularly in the context of a significant expansion in the number of college graduates and institutions. Using novel data with approximately one million college graduates from 20 different cohorts in Brazil, we find that returns to skill have not decreased; in fact, they increased by 24\% over 16 years. The supply of college-educated workers has grown, primarily from newer, lower-ranked, and lower-wage-premium universities. Changes in the composition of college workers seem to have driven a decrease in the college premium, even though returns to skill are increasing. Using a simple supply and demand framework (Katz and Murphy, 1992) we show that skill-biased technical change (SBTC) increased by 3\% per year over a 12-year period, in contrast to the apparent -0.1\% yearly decrease indicated by the unadjusted data.

This paper estimates the effects of labor inspections in Brazil. Inspections reduce establishment employment by about 8% within three years, driven mainly by lower hiring, with modest wage declines. Both deterrence and punishment shape these responses: even non-penalized firms contract, while penalties amplify effects, especially on wages. At the worker level, inspections do not reduce long-term employment. Stayers experience slower wage growth, whereas leavers gain wages by moving to higher–wage-premium firms. Inspections thus foster compliance but induce establishment contraction, with worker reallocation mitigating costs and highlighting the dual effects of enforcement.

Using a rich Brazilian panel dataset and an occupation-task mapping, we investigate whether returns to experience depend on the types of jobs performed by workers. We find that returns to experience in non-routine tasks, especially returns to analytical tasks, are much larger than returns to routine tasks. This gap increases with schooling, suggesting that schooling and non-routine tasks are complementary in the human capital production function. These are important findings for developing countries similar to Brazil, where approximately 70% of workers’ tasks are routine. 

We investigate the extent to which labor market power in the Brazilian formal labor market contributes to the persistence of the gender wage gap. Using linked employer-employee data (2010–2017), we perform a standard gender wage gap decomposition and introduce labor market concentration, measured by the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, as a proxy for competition. Our findings suggest that labor market concentration plays a negligible role in explaining the gender wage gap, countering the initial hypothesis regarding labor market power. The average worker in Brazil is employed in a low-concentration market, where small associations have no meaningful impact on wages.