Luciene Torres de Mello Pereira

Published and Forthcoming Paper

Of Cities and Slums

Working Paper

Educational Outcomes and Enfranchisement

Work in Progress

From Malthus to Malthus

A veneer of common structural transformation patterns conceals vast differences in the growth and distribution of human capital of countries. In one extreme, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and some segments of China, have transitioned, within just two generations, from prototypical agrarian Malthusian economies to fast-growing, high-skill-intensive modern service economies. In the other extreme, many countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia have transitioned from Malthusian to pseudo-Malthusian economies: Mostly urban but intensive in low-skill service jobs and with low fertility but also low upward mobility. We argue that the direction of education policies of countries is a key determinant for such divergence. In the data, those countries that prioritize subsidies to university education in detriment of elementary and secondary education are precisely the countries that end up with large segments of their population with very low education attainment. In contrast, countries that emphasize the provision of high quality elementary and secondary education are the ones that have transitioned to being modern economies. We enhance the standard quantity quality fertility-vs-education model with multiple skills and school levels and embed it in a production economy in which the non-agricultural sectors can be produced with different skill intensities. We show that the model quite naturally replicates the divergent dynamics of countries according to their observed emphasis in their provision of education. We then calibrate the model to the experience of different countries and show that counterfactuals on their education policies would have resulted in huge differences in their current level of development.

Trade Shock and Slums: Changing Rural-Urban Migration Opportunities

This paper studies the effects of the China trade shock on slum expansion in Brazil during the boom in bilateral trade from 2000 to 2010. Using a shift-share IV design, which combines the rise in trade value with baseline industry composition across local labor markets for identification, we find that regions connected with greater exposure to export demand experienced relatively lower growth in slums. To explain this result, since many slum dwellers migrated from rural areas concentrated in agricultural and extractive sectors ---industries responsible for the largest share of Brazil's export growth to China— we disentangle the local effects from the migratory component of the economic shock using pre-shock migrant networks. Our findings indicate that increased export demand through migrant networks helped curb slum expansion by redirecting internal in-migration from urban areas facing greater import competition to regions concentrated in the extractive sector and by reducing out-migration from agricultural areas. Furthermore, our mechanism analysis reveals that the slower slum expansion was associated with a relative increase in average earnings for workers in non-tradable sectors and a shift in the workforce toward agricultural and extractive industries in areas more exposed to export demand.

Given the importance of credit constraints for young workers, mainly in developing countries, we evaluate the credit restrictions and financial access of Brazilian individuals between 18 and 24 years old, since 2016. We seek to relate the individual credit decisions to the entry and transitions into the labor market. This study focuses on the relationship between credit decision making and labor market decisions and aims to address three main questions: (i) What is the demographic and socioeconomic profile of young people between 18 and 24 years old, who access and take credit in Brazil, compared to young individuals who do not?; (ii) How youth loans are related to non-employment shocks and income shocks?; (iii) What are the impacts on youth welfare of the parameters that capture credit constraints in the estimated structural model, and how do these parameters impact differently subgroups of youth?

Social Mobility and Urban Integration

In this paper we study the process of urbanization in a developing country like Brazil, focusing on the interplay between formal cities, slums and distant poor neighborhood, and how the different education opportunities in these locations can affect social mobility.

Publication in Brazilian Journal

Casamentos Seletivos e Desigualdade de Renda