Diana Silva , Carlos Azzoni (p)

The goal of this study is to identify the contribution of agglomeration effects and spatial sorting for the determination of individual and local wages in Brazilian urban agglomerations. Studies in Labor Economics show that skills are responsible for a large portion of the wage differential. The literature on Urban Economics considers the economies of agglomeration as a relevant wage determinant in dense labor markets. The higher productivity of dense areas can be attributed to the concentration of more productive workers and firms more productive, which became known in this literature as sorting. Studies in Urban Economics only control the sorting of unobserved individual attributes. This study uses a wage decomposition model to deal with the spatial sorting of unobserved attributes of firms and of workers in a matched panel of workers and firms. The pure effects of agglomeration (density) on local wages are estimated in a two-stage model. The first stage estimates a wage equation including the observed characteristics of workers and firms and the effects of location, with a microdata panel of Administrative records from the Ministry of Labor (RAIS, 2002-2014). The second stage decomposes the location effects into components associated to local characteristics and to unobserved attributes of firms and workers. The identification strategy involves controlling for fixed effects of workers and firms, and using an instrumental variable to identifying the effects of agglomeration. Satellite data on illumination are used to estimate the urban occupied area in each local labor markets. The results indicate that the worker effects are more relevant to explain wage variation than the firm’s effects. The model of preference indicates a density effect on wages of 4.9%, much higher than the literature lower bound (3%). This suggests that ignoring the variables included in this study can lead to an underestimation of the effects of agglomeration.

Ana Maria Barufi (p), Raul Silveira Neto , Leandro Duarte

Differently from the US urban scenario, in most Latin American cities, low-income families tend to live in the periphery, far from the CBD or the urban core, the so-called core-periphery division. As most formal jobs are located in the urban center and public transport is poorly provided, accessing them can be a difficult task for low-skilled workers living in the periphery. This situation may generate a spatial mismatch in the labor market of these cities since, because of the lack of accessibility to job opportunities, low-skilled workers need to rely in informal jobs in the periphery to survive, which tend to be filled by word-of-mouth through social connections. In fact, workers in the informal sector usually commute for a shorter distance and in less time, especially those with the lowest incomes. Their accessibility to job opportunities is more limited, especially to job openings in the formal sector. Labor market duality between the formal and the informal sector also generate barriers to entrance in the former sector. Thus, opportunities in the formal sector are not easily accessed by low-skilled workers because of a fiercer competition for these positions and because of geography (a combination of housing market conditions with public transit availability and social connections). However, very few researchers have explored evidence about this kind of spatial mismatch. In this research, we investigate the relationship between accessibility to jobs and informality in Brazil, where informal jobs represent 40% of the total. We provide two kinds of evidence. Firstly, considering specifically the case of the São Paulo Metropolitan Region (Brazil’s largest metropolitan region), we use an Instrumental Variable approach, based on information about river shore access to the first center of the city. River beds were used in a development plan to build large corridors in the area a few decades ago, but economic agents are practically unaware of their existence. This instrument is used to obtain the impact of accessibility to jobs on the likelihood to obtain formal and informal jobs. In addition, using a cross section of all Brazilian urban centers and information from the Demographic Census of 2010, we explore the relationship between commuting time to access formal jobs in these cities and their level of labor market informality. Our results suggest that there is a negative relationship between accessibility to jobs and labor market informality in Brazil, in accordance to this specific spatial mismatch hypothesis.

Nuria Benítez Llamazares (p)

Obesity has been defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an "abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health". The increasingly growing rates of obese people in the last few decades (remarkably in developed countries), has raised concerns among researchers and national health systems, and the analysis of its causes and consequences for human health has become a priority. Similarly, in socioeconomic investigation we find that obesity has been considered as a key factor for living conditions from a social and economic perspective. In previous research, we analysed if being obese had an impact on the probability of participating in the Spanish labour market, using data taken from the first edition of the European Health Interview Survey (EHIS 2009). Our results indicated that high rates of BMI (obesity) implied lower probabilities of occupational participation, especially for working-age females living in Spain. The aim of this study is to continue our work, using data taken from the second edition of the European Health Interview Survey (EHIS 2014). Same, body mass index (BMI) is being used as an indicator for nutritional status, and we carry out both descriptive and econometric analysis using probit and tobit models for limited dependent variables (LDV). We intend to compare the results from both surveys lengthwise.