Speaker: Alexandre Janiak
Affiliation: PUC
Date and time: Wednesday, June 11, 2025 14:30 (Santiago, GMT-04:00)
Location:

• Auditorio at the Central Bank of Chile, Morandé 115, second floor.
• Online meeting

Registration: seminarios@bcentral.cl

Abstract: We construct a unified data set at the occupation level covering the last 25 years for Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Following Autor (2015), we compute employment growth and wage growth at the baseline income percentile level by using the employment and wage evolution of each occupation within each country. As Maloney and Molina (2019), we find no evidence of polarization in the region. This is not because technological change is not driving out the same occupations in Latin America as in richer economies but rather because these occupations were never “middle-class” jobs in the region. Finally, we also find a role for minimum wage increases which may have dampen the demand for (formal) low-skill jobs and may have provided significant income gains for low-skill workers.