Matías Ciaschi

This paper investigates whether the impact of trade shocks on employment and wages persists across generations. Using survey data with retrospective information on parental employment, we study the causal effect of increased Chinese import competition in Brazilian industries on individuals with differently exposed fathers. Results show that several years after the shock, children of more exposed fathers have lower education and earnings, lower chances of formal jobs, and are more likely to rely on social assistance. These effects are substantially stronger for children from disadvantaged background, indicating that the shock had a negative impact on intergenerational mobility.

This paper presents comprehensive evidence on intergenerational mobility in Mozambique—the country with the lowest documented level of mobility worldwide—and investigates its relationship with child labor. Using survey data that includes a module on non co-resident adult children, we document a strong link between children's educational attainment and parental education and household wealth. Interestingly, our findings suggest that child labor perpetuates intergenerational inequality, not merely as a response to income shocks, but mainly due to labor market structures—particularly the complementarity between parental and child labor and the substantial opportunity costs associated with schooling. These findings underscore the need for targeted policies that decouple children's labor market prospects from those of their parents and enhance awareness of the long-term returns to education.

This paper studies the relationship between social intergenerational mobility and economic development by analyzing mobility and productivity patterns across cohorts from a lifetime perspective. We present a theoretical model integrating human capital accumulation, intergenerational mobility, and ability allocation to investigate how social mobility influences economic performance. Then, we use harmonized household survey data from nine Latin American countries over 50 birth cohorts, to empirically test our hypotheses, focusing on outcomes such as employment and incomes. We exploit variation in intergenerational mobility across cohorts and countries over time. Our results suggest that cohorts with higher social mobility experience better lifetime outcomes, potentially contributing to innovation, technological progress, and economic development.

The contribution of this paper is to provide an updated and more complete picture on intergenerational mobility in Latin America. First, we update the educational mobility estimates of Neidhöfer, Serrano and Gasparini (2018) including more recent cohorts. Then, we estimate long-run trends in intergenerational mobility for a multitude of countries in Latin America going beyond parent-child correlations in educational attainment, by using several indicators of well-being, such as the socio-economic situation of individuals, job stability, housing and household assets. Unlike indicators based on educational attainment, which often suggest rising social mobility, our results show that the chances of reaching a given level of economic well-being and moving up the social ladder have remained largely unchanged over time in Latin America. In fact, the returns to education have even diminished when compared to the growing influence of parental background.

This paper analyzes the impact of macroeconomic conditions on individual post-secondary educational choices and long-term labor market outcomes within the Latin American context. Utilizing detailed data, the study explores how economic fluctuations influence educational and labor decisions, with a focus on heterogeneities across key dimensions such as parental background. The findings reveal significant differences in how individuals from different socio-economic backgrounds and genders respond to economic cycles, providing insights into the extent to which these fluctuations either mitigate or exacerbate pre-existing inequalities. The results contribute to a better understanding of the interaction between economic conditions, human capital investment, and labor market outcomes, offering valuable implications for policies aimed at addressing inequality in the region.

In contrast with developped countries where this phenomenon is more recent, Latin America's countries coexists with the presence of populist leaders since decades. Previous contributions found in economic inequality one of the roots of the surge of these leaders. Nevertheless, this works proposes that is inequality of opportunities, captured by intergenerational mobility, the relevant component that explains this phenomenon. In particular, we estimate individual level models of the probability to support different populist ideas depending on individual mobility, based on microdata of Latinobarometro for 18 countries between 1998 and 2023. The results suggest that those people who experimented higher degree of intergenerational mobility supports less populist ideas, even after controlling by individual characteristics, and particularly, by the mobility of the cohort of birth, economic inequality and per capita GDP of every country all the years. Also we add fixed effects by country, year and birth cohort. The findings also suggests that people with populist ideas, also tend effectively to support more these types of leaders. Took all together, this evidence highlights that the continuous appearence of populist leaders in Latin America during the last decades can be explained, at least in part, by the low intergenerational mobility in the region.

This paper adjusts conventional assessments of educational mobility in Latin America by incorporating quality adjustments into intergenerational mobility estimates. Using learning-adjusted years of education (LAYS), which accounts for differences in educational quality across cohorts and contexts, we compare mobility patterns against traditional measures. Our findings reveal that apparent improvements in educational mobility are overstated when quality is ignored. The quality adjustment uncovers a critical mechanism: intergenerational persistence was lower in earlier generations than previously estimated because parental education, measured solely by years of schooling, masked significant quality deficits. Consequently, observed increases in intergenerational mobility partly reflect improvements in average educational quality rather than genuine reductions in relative persistence.

This paper investigates the potential distributional consequences of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in Latin American labor markets. Using harmonized household survey data from 14 countries, we combine four recently developed AI occupational exposure indices---the AI Occupational Exposure Index (AIOE), the Complementarity-Adjusted AIOE (C-AIOE), the Generative AI Exposure Index (GBB), and the AI-Generated Occupational Exposure Index (GENOE)--to analyze patterns across countries and worker groups. We validate these measures by comparing task profiles between Latin America and high-income economies using PIAAC data, and develop a contextual adjustment that incorporates informality, wage structures, and union coverage. Finally, we simulate first order impacts of AI-induced displacement on earnings, poverty, and inequality. The results show substantial heterogeneity, with higher levels of AI- related risk among women, younger, more educated, and formal workers. Indices that account for task complementarities show flatter gradients across the income and education distribution. Simulations suggest that displacement effects may lead to only moderate increases in inequality and poverty in the absence of mitigating policies.

This paper examines the causal effects of trade shocks on local labor markets (LLMs), with a focus on the rural–urban divide. In particular, it analyzes the impact of China's integration into global trade on Chilean LLMs with varying degrees of rurality. The identification strategy exploits variation in pre-shock industrial specialization across LLMs and changes over time in global Chinese import penetration and industry-specific export demand. We study short-run effects (1996–2006) and medium-run dynamics (through 2022). Urban LLMs, more exposed to import competition, experienced declines in income, increases in poverty and informality, and persistent schooling losses. Rural LLMs, linked to primary sectors benefiting from Chinese demand, saw sustained income growth and reductions in poverty and informality. These asymmetric effects likely contributed to narrowing regional disparities and underscore the importance of geographic exposure in shaping the distributional consequences of global trade integration.

There is a large and growing literature on the effects of an income shock on women's intrahousehold bargaining power. For instance, the well-known and widespread Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are typically women-targeted and therefore could alter gender gaps. Previous contributions show that these policies increased women's participation in household spending decisions. However, they may imply increased responsibilities for women, reinforcing traditional gender roles. In this paper we empirically evaluate the theoretically ambiguous effect of a CCT program in Argentina - the AUH - on female empowerment. Based on a difference in difference methodology, our main findings indicate that the program reduced the likelihood of women being in charge of domestic chores only for single and working women. In contrast, cohabiting and non-working mothers' bargaining power decreased after the AUH. These heterogeneous results are relevant since we also find that the AUH increased the likelihood of women being in a couple. This evidence emphasizes the need for a more comprehensive discussion about the design of these widely implemented programs in order to avoid unintended consequences, particularly those that are likely to widen gender gaps.

While Latin America has historically been considered a region of very high inequality, the performance of most Latin American countries in terms of reduction of income inequality has been remarkable good in the first decade of this century. Given that those improvements took place in a context of rising inequality in most of the world, the evolution of income inequality in the region has caught the attention of researchers and policy makers around the world. Taking advantage of a large database of comparable microdata from household surveys, this article updates the evidence on the trends of income inequality in all Latin American countries for the period 1992-2015. It also provides an analysis of how the distinctive evolution of income inequality in this century in Latin America has changed the position of the different countries of the region in both, the global distribution of income in the world and the global distribution of income in Latin America. Finally, the paper decomposes the evolution of income inequality in several countries of the region, discussing the role played by several factors on that evolution.