Join the networkPublications (97)
At the global level, gender gaps in labour force participation have narrowed and over half a billion women have joined the workforce in the last 30 years. However, there is enormous variation in women's labour force participation (FLFP) across low- and middle-income countries, and there is no...
We study the causal effect of motherhood on labour market outcomes in Latin America by adopting an event study approach around the birth of the first child based on panel data from national household surveys for Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. Our main contributions are: (i) providing new...
In this paper we analyse informal work in Mexico, which accounts for the majority of employment in the country and has grown over time. We document that the informal sector is composed of two distinct parts: salaried informal employment and self-employment. Relative to self-employment and formal...
We estimate the relative importance of alternative labour supply and demand mechanisms in explaining the rise of female labour force participation over the last 55 years in Mexico. The growth of female labour force participation in Mexico between 1960 and 2015 followed an S-shape, with a...
Using a special module of the 2015 Mexican Labour Force Survey with information on workers’ preferences for jobs with social security coverage, I estimate that 80 per cent of informal workers in large urban areas would prefer to work in a job that provides them with such coverage. A...
The decline of employment in middle-wage, routine task intensive jobs has been well documented for the USA. Increased offshoring towards lower-income countries such as Mexico has been proposed as a potential driver of this decline. Our analysis provides a unique and new approach to address the...
This paper follows a quasi-experimental research design to assess the impact of the electronic payment system of Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. The switch from cash payments to electronic payments delivered via savings accounts is found to have medium-term effects...
This article is currently available on early view. The paper studies the decline of the labor income share (LIS) in Mexico during the period 1990–2015. The decline is mostly explained by reductions within the economy’s major sectors (including manufacturing, tradables, and non-...
The effects of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) on poverty and well-being have been widely studied. However, there is limited knowledge on how a CCT should respond to the dynamics of poverty. How should program administrators treat beneficiaries that exit poverty in period t-1, but exhibit a...
Income inequality is the result of complex processes with multiple interacting driving forces but understanding those drivers in emerging economies is particularly difficult because of data and analytical challenges. While most middle-income countries produce comprehensive household surveys these...
Using height as a proxy for physical productivity of labour, this paper estimates the selection of Mexican migration to the United States at the beginning of the flow (1906–08), and it exploits a natural experiment of history to evaluate the impact of random shocks on short-run...
As with many other developed and emerging economies, in recent decades Mexico has experienced a long-term decline in the labour income share. In other words, wages have decreased compared with other sources of income such as capital income. The share of wages in total income has fallen from about...
Since 1989, inequality in Mexico has risen, declined, and risen again. The evolution of labour income inequality is at the core of this pattern. To reverse the current trend of rising inequality, access to secondary and tertiary education should continue to expand, minimum wages should be...
Income inequality in Mexico increased between 1989 and 1994; between 1994 and 2006, inequality declined; and, between 2006 and 2014, inequality was again on the rise. We apply decomposition techniques to analyse the proximate determinants of labour income inequality and fiscal incidence...
As with many other developed and emerging economies, in recent decades Mexico has experienced a long-term decline in the labour income share. The decline is observed in both the share of wages in value added and in more comprehensive measures that include the labour income of the self-employed....
This study presents an analysis of the electoral impacts of one of the most prominent conditional cash transfers in the world: Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. Using population censuses, and POP’s administrative records and elections data, we exploit the...