Research

Job Market Paper

Do Institutions Remove Inflation's Grease? Evidence from Brazil's Indexed Minimum Wage [Link]
Joint with Emilio Colombi

How do labor market institutions shape the propagation of inflation shocks? We address this question by studying Brazil's annually indexed minimum wage in a high-inflation context. Conventional wisdom suggests that inflation can "grease" labor market adjustments, but institutional wage-setting may alter this mechanism. Using administrative data, we show that indexation creates upward nominal wage rigidity: workers exposed to the policy experience fewer month-to-month wage increases before indexation events, and firms anticipate the policy by rigidifying wages of workers who will be newly bound. We evaluate the macroeconomic implications by introducing a cost-push shock to a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous labor and an indexed minimum wage. While staggered indexation amplifies the inflation as grease mechanism by introducing nominal rigidities, anticipation dampens it via intertemporal substitution. Overall, cost-push shocks have a lower effect compared to a setting where the minimum wage indexes every period. Our findings demonstrate that even in high-inflation environments, the institutional structure of wage-setting fundamentally shapes how shocks propagate through the economy.

Working Papers

Formal Effects of Informal Labor Supply and Work Permits: Evidence from Venezuelan Refugees in Colombia, Revise & Resubmit Journal of Labor Economics [Link]
Joint with Dany Bahar and Ahmet Gulek

We analyze the Venezuelan refugee crisis in Colombia to separately identify effects of informal immigration and work permit policies on labor markets. Using Synthetic Instrumental Variables and triple difference-in-differences designs, we find that the informal labor supply shock displaced native workers in both informal and formal sectors, indicating high substitutability between worker types (elasticity = 11). Work permits reduced competition in the informal sector while increasing it in the formal sector, creating 24,440 new formal jobs and approximately $43 million in annual tax revenue. Results suggest work permits create productivity spillovers through reduced skill mismatch, providing economic rationale for immigrant integration policies.

Research in Progress

The Gender Gap in Post-job Displacement Outcomes and its Aggregate Consequences, Draft Available Upon Request
Joint with Martina Uccioli

Do gender norms lead to an inefficient reallocation of resources? This study investigates the role of gender norms in a household's reaction to major economic shocks. By leveraging rich longitudinal data on couples' employment, time use, and self-reported gender norms, we examine how employment shocks affect household resource allocation. In particular, we test whether gender norms prevent women from returning to work at the same pace as men following a job loss. In the UK, we find that in the long run men are more likely than women to return to work after a layoff. This asymmetry is fully explained by women who subscribe to traditional gender norms: progressive women have the same labor market response to a layoff as men. We plan to use the estimates to inform a search-and matching model, to quantify the role of gender norms-induced frictions in the speed of recovery after economic downturns.