Job Market Paper
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Sorting into (In)formality: Job Offers and Worker Preferences
When do formal job offers move workers out of informality? I study informal workers’ willingness to accept formal employment and the role of wages and working conditions in their acceptance decisions. I use labor inspections in Brazil that require employers to register informal workers, creating opportunities to formalize within existing worker–employer matches. Within six months of an inspection, new formal hires correspond to 78 percent of detected informal men and 68 percent of detected informal women. Take-up varies substantially across workplaces: women are more likely than men to formalize in female-dominated industries, while the opposite holds in male-dominated industries. To better understand take-up rates, I develop and estimate a choice model in which workers decide whether to accept a formal contract at their current employer or pursue an informal alternative. Firm-level estimates show that men and women respond similarly to wages but differ in their valuations of non-wage attributes, particularly flexibility and parental leave. A complementary survey experiment elicits workers’ decisions under a guaranteed formal offer. Most respondents accept, and preserving take-home pay raises acceptance from 61 to 79 percent while substantially narrowing the gender gap in acceptance. This high willingness to formalize contrasts with low same-employer informal-to-formal transition rates in the broader labor market, suggesting that many workers lack formal offers they would accept. When offers are available, wages, working conditions, and the value of the informal alternative shape acceptance decisions.
Working Papers
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Labor Market Flexibility and Gender Heterogeneity in Labor Allocation
Does greater flexibility create job opportunities and improve labor allocation? This paper examines how firms and workers respond to a labor market flexibility shock in a setting characterized by high regulation costs. Focusing on the Brazilian labor market, I leverage linked formal employer-employee data to analyze the impacts of the 2017 Labor Reform, a policy that removed constraints on flexible work schedules. I show that this policy change led to an increase in job opportunities and employment, especially in part-time positions. Notably, women experienced greater employment gains. At the state level, I observe that while the reform did not significantly impact unemployment rates, it contributed to reduce informality, which accounted for 40% of the workforce in 2016. Gender-specific analysis indicates that this effect is primarily driven by women transitioning from informal to formal employment within the private sector in the short run, followed by both women and men in the state-level economy in the medium run. These findings underscore the interaction between labor market flexibility and gender disparities, underscoring the potential of such reforms to reconfigure employment allocation. The case of the Brazilian reform offers a more nuanced perspective when informality is considered.
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Managers and the Transmission of Gender Norms and Practices
This paper studies how managers’ gender attitudes shape workplace practices and culture. Using data from a multinational firm operating in over 100 countries, we leverage cross-country manager rotations to identify the effects of male managers’ gender attitudes on gender pay gaps within teams. Managers from countries with one standard deviation more progressive gender attitudes reduce the pay gap by 5 percentage points (18% of the baseline gap), half of which is driven by women being promoted. These effects are strongest in conservative countries. They persist even after managers rotate out, in part because they influence the practices and attitudes of local managers, including peers who interact with them but are not under the direct purview of foreign managers.
Selected Work in Progress
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Coaching the Match: Experimental Evidence from Chatbot Assistance and AI Augmentation in Mozambique’s Gig Economy
This project studies whether digital capability-building and AI-enabled tools can improve labor-market outcomes for workers in Mozambique. In partnership with Biscate, a digital platform for informal service work, we design a three-arm randomized controlled trial comparing the status quo with a WhatsApp-based training program and a version augmented with AI tools for pricing, invoicing, marketing, and worker–client communication. The experiment examines whether these interventions reduce information, behavioral, and matching frictions, improving job completion, earnings, and worker retention, with particular attention to heterogeneous effects by gender.
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Bargaining across the Public–Private Margin: Unions, Gender Gaps, and Economic Mobility
This project studies how the expansion of public-sector employment across Brazilian local labor markets shapes worker mobility and gender gaps. I exploit variation in public-sector job growth and in the substitutability of occupations across the public and private sectors. Motivated by the higher propensity of women to transition into public employment, I examine whether differences in job amenities and employment protection contribute to gender differences in public–private sector mobility. More broadly, the project sheds light on how the public sector shapes labor-market opportunities and the allocation of workers across sectors, and how these effects differ by gender.
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Assimilation Policy and Indigenous Political Institutions: Evidence from American Indian Constitutions
This project studies how assimilation policies targeting American Indians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries affected individualism, ethnic identity, and attitudes towards the U.S. government, as measured through the clauses and language used in over 350 newly digitised tribal constitutions and charters. We first demonstrate that there is meaningful variation in the types of clauses (e.g., blood quantum or residence restrictions on membership) and language (e.g., emphasising the “tribe” or the “individual”) across constitutions. We then examine how tribal characteristics and historical exposure to government policies – such as Indian schools and land allotment – affected constitutional features. Finally, we employ natural language processing techniques to measure the extent to which these characteristics affected trust and cooperation with the U.S. government during the Indian New Deal, as measured by semantic similarity between constitutions written in the 1930s and a ‘model’ constitution distributed by the Indian Office at the time. This project contributes to our understanding of how assimilation policies influenced Indigenous institutional development and political culture, highlighting the long-term effects of government intervention on tribal sovereignty, collective identity, and intergovernmental relations in American Indian Nations.