Research Economist - Banco de México
less than 1 minute read
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Publiqué una entrada en el blog del Observatorio Fiscal de la Universidad Javierana acerca de los impactos del salario mínimo, y cómo fijarlo para el 2021 en un escenario de pandemia.
¿Ajustes al salario mínimo? Una conversación incómoda pero necesaria
4 minute read
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Between 2004 and 2018, the spread of wages in Mexico’s private labor sector remained stable. Nonetheless, the underlying factors behind salary dispersion underwent significant shifts. To uncover these changes, we analyze an employer-employee dataset comprising the near-universe of Mexico’s formal employment. We estimate log wage models and decompose earnings dispersions into worker, workplace and sorting components. At the national level, we find that sorting increased its importance over time. While worker-level factors were the main contributors to salary variability in the 2004-2008 period, workplace factors became as important as worker-level factors in the 2014-2018 time segment. The influence of workplace factors on wage dispersion correlates negatively with per capita GDP at the regional level.
5 minute read
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In January 2019, in an effort to boost activity on the northern Mexican border, the authorities increased the minimum wage by 100 percent and decreased the value-added tax (VAT) by half. Disentangling both effects, we find increments in prices due to the minimum wage hike that were more than offset by the decreases associated with the VAT. In the absence of both policy changes, average prices would have been higher. The share of informal labor in the production of different goods seems to be playing a role in the impact of the minimum wage on prices.
2 minute read
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Texto de carta al Honorable Representate Arcos Benavides sobre Ley del Economista
4 minute read
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We analyze the efficacy of hiring tax credits, particularly in distressed labor markets. These types of programs have provenhard to assess as their introduction tends to be endogenous. We find sizable and robust impacts on employment and unemployment: a $9,000 credit leads to a nearly 0.5 percentage points reduction in the unemployment rate and a 3% increase in employment in the counties where the credit was made available.