Essays in Economics of internal migration

• Autor(a) principal: Ferraz, Tiago Pontes
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/12/12138/tde-04122023-162728/
• topic: Domestic work; Female participation; Internal migration; Labor markets; Mercados de trabalho; Migração interna; Participação feminina; Trabalho doméstico

This doctoral thesis consists of two articles whose central theme is the economic impacts of the internal mobility of workers. The first essay investigates how labor markets can adjust to supply shocks in a context of high informality and with formal sector firms being able to adjust via non-wage benefits. Using a shift-share instrument approach that combines weather-induced migration with past settlement patterns in each destination municipality, this paper shows that increasing the migration rate leads to a smaller reduction in earnings in the formal than in the informal sectors and to a reduction in the share of formal workers receiving non-wage benefits, leading to a fall in total compensation. Less-educated workers bear most of these costs, especially in the informal sector, resulting in an increase in earnings inequality. The second essay investigates the role of domestic workers, especially incoming migrants from the Semiarid region, in the labor force participation of high-educated women in the destination municipalities. This paper uses an empirical strategy similar to that adopted in the first essay and shows that the incoming migration to a given destination alleviates some constraints that high-educated women face and leads to an increase in labor force participation and the probability of working at least 40 hours per week. In particular, women living in households with children aged less than 6 years, who are more constrained. The impacts are larger in places with a lower supply of preschools, but smaller in more violent municipalities and among women living in more conservative environments regarding social and gender norms.