Matías Ciaschi

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.

This paper provides an updated and expanded view of intergenerational mobility in Latin America by moving beyond the traditional focus on educational outcomes. Using harmonized data for 18 countries over the last five decades, we first update standard measures of educational mobility and confirm a sustained improvement for recent cohorts. However, a central contribution of this paper is to examine broader dimensions of economic mobility—such as job stability, housing conditions, asset ownership, and perceived socio-economic status—through a composite well-being index. Contrary to the optimistic picture suggested by rising educational mobility, our results show that mobility in economic well-being has remained largely stagnant across cohorts. We document a widening disconnect between education and overall socio-economic progress: while access to schooling has expanded, and intergenerational persistence in education has declined, the influence of parental background on individuals’ economic well-being has not diminished—and has even increased for younger generations.

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.

This paper investigates the heterogeneous impact of regional unemployment during adolescence on human capital accumulation and earnings in Brazil. Using retrospective household survey data, we analyze individuals from different socioeconomic backgrounds who were exposed to varying unemployment rates across regions when they were 15 years old. On average, higher regional unemployment at age 15 is associated with greater educational attainment, reduced labor informality, and improved wages in adulthood. However, these positive average effects mask striking heterogeneity by parental background. Effects are concentrated among children from low-education families and those whose fathers worked in agricultural, craft, and service occupations—sectors characterized by high parent-child labor complementarities. Children from educated families and white-collar backgrounds experience negligible long-run effects. We provide suggestive evidence that this heterogeneity operates through differential responses to labor market opportunities: when unemployment rises, children from disadvantaged families—where youth work complements parental employment—face constrained job prospects and remain in school longer, generating lasting human capital gains. These patterns intensify during severe recessions. Our findings suggest that in contexts with accessible education and strong parent-child labor linkages, the absence of employment opportunities during downturns can reduce educational disparities and weaken the intergenerational transmission of inequality.

This paper examines the relationship between intergenerational educational mobility and populist attitudes in Latin America, a region characterized by low levels of intergenerational mobility and a long-standing presence of populist leadership. In contexts where social origin strongly predicts individual outcomes, perceptions of unfairness may create fertile ground for populist narratives. Using harmonized microdata from 18 waves of the Latinobarómetro survey covering individuals born between 1940 and 2000, we document a robust negative association between intergenerational mobility and populist attitudes across multiple indicators, including anti-democratic attitudes, support for military governments, anti-immigrant sentiments, and institutional distrust. These results hold when using a relative mobility measure that captures pure positional change net of structural trends, and at the cohort level when exploiting standard mobility measures from the literature. Cohort-level estimates further reveal that the effect of persistence is amplified in high-inequality contexts, suggesting that immobility and contemporaneous inequality act as complements in shaping political discontent. Decomposing inequality into opportunity and effort components, we find evidence suggesting that populist attitudes are mostly driven by inequalities of opportunity. These findings suggest that the persistent emergence of populist leadership in Latin America is linked to the region’s stubbornly low intergenerational mobility and unequal access to opportunities.

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.

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.