This paper studies a labor market where heterogeneous workers climb a job ladder with informal and formal rungs. In this environment, the incidence of informal jobs in a worker's career is a function of her skill level and the economy's history of aggregate states. I estimate the model in Brazilian labor-force survey data, and show it successfully reproduces the observed heterogeneity and dynamics around informality. In equilibrium, informal jobs are less productive and are subject to higher layoff risk than their formal counterparts.

Young individuals are currently living with their parents more than at any other point in time, while also spending more on housing. In this paper, I first show how labor market entry conditions affect housing tenure and affordability in the long term, by using the unemployment rate at the time of graduation as an exogenous shock to income. I perform this analysis across Europe for the last 25 years.

I study whether and how retail chains and their geographic distribution of stores contribute to the propagation of shocks across regions in the United States. Linking detailed store scanner micro-data to a county-level house price dataset for the period of the Great Recession, I investigate the spread of house-price induced local shocks through the networks of retail chains. My main empirical finding is that county-level prices are sensitive to shocks in distant counties that happen to be served by the same retail chains.

The participation of women in the U.S. labor market increased during the past century. However, progress stalled and since 2000 the employment rate of women has not progressed. These changes are driven by the least educated women who have decreased their employment rate. In parallel, potential employment opportunities for this demographic group have grown: Service and clerical occupations, traditional sources of employment for low-educated women, have experienced employment growth over this period.

Propensity score matching is often used to estimate treatment effects when there is selection on observables; however, it fails to identify causal effects when one person's treatment affects another's outcome. This phenomenon is known as spillovers. I propose a novel network propensity score matching approach that identifies both the average treatment effects and the average spillover effects between individuals. My approach is grounded on an endogenous model of network formation with spillovers on the outcome.

This paper analyzes the impact of minimum wages on different margins of firm dynamics using Costa Rica’s occupation-specific minimum wage setting. To this purpose, I assemble rich administrative data covering the universe of workers and firms in the 2006-2017 period to construct firm-level exposure measures to the minimum wage policy, and estimate the impact of differential exposure to the minimum wage on firm outcomes at several year horizons.

I study treatment effects under multiple options that lack a clear ranking. When the identifying variation stems from multiple instruments, agents can switch into different options and from many initial states. I discuss how to use conditional choice rules to estimate the shares of agents switching at well-defined margins of choice and their treatment effects. I develop an empirical strategy consistent with this framework and apply it to assess the impact of childcare choice in Colombia on children’s development.

It is well documented that routine-biased technical change ("RBTC") led to labor market polarization during 1980-2000. In particular, the employment and wages of non-routine occupations, which include low-wage manual and high-wage cognitive ones, increased relative to routine occupations. I document that during 2000-2016, wage polarization stopped in that the wages of non-routine manual occupations fell in relative and absolute terms.