A Land of Unequal Chances: Social Mobility Across Mexican Regions. (with Miles Corak) (Working Paper version available here )
Using a new data set, I estimate the patterns of social mobility in Mexico and its regions, contributing to the growing literature on regional social mobility patterns. I identify that although Mexico is a country with high levels of intergenerational rank persistence, thus low levels of social mobility, there is substantial variability across its regions. While 35 out of 100 individuals born in the bottom quintile of the household asset distribution and in the South of the country experience upward mobility, twice as large a proportion of those born in the bottom quintile but in Mexico City experience the same type of mobility. Controlling for multiple characteristics at the household and neighborhood levels, I find a penalization of 12 percentiles in terms of upward mobility against individuals born in the South, with respect the rest of the country, and a boost of 10 percentiles for those with origin in Mexico City.
Unequal gradients: Gender, skin tone, and intergenerational economic mobility. (with Roberto Vélez-Grajales and Gastón Yalonetzky) (Working paper version available here) (R&R at Journal of Population Economics)
We study how the intersection between skin tone and gender shapes intergenerational mobility of economic resources in Mexico. Using two recent social mobility surveys, we estimate the rank persistence and transition matrices by gender combined with skin tone groups. First, we find no differences in intergenerational mobility patterns between light-skin men and women. Second, the colorist mobility pattern observed in previous literature affects men and women differently. Namely, while women of intermediate and dark-skin tonalities have a lower expected rank than their light-skin peers, only men of the darkest tonalities suffer from the same penalization. Thirdly, women of intermediate and darker skin tones have lower persistence rates at the top of the distribution of economic resources than men of the same skin tonality.
Modeling the Learning Impacts of Educational Disruptions in the Short and Long-run. (available here)
This paper proposes a framework for analyzing the short and long-run effects of temporary educational disruptions on children’s learning progression. The framework explicitly models continuous parental investments, filling a gap in the literature related to explicit models of learning progression and acquisition. The model also considers economic resources as part of the resources employed by parents to mitigate the effects of a temporary shock in instruction, expanding previous work by Neidhöffer, Lustig, and Tommasi (2021). With this model, I estimate the potential effects of the instructional disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. The estimates suggest that the potential persistent loss in learning with respect to the counterfactual represents 47% of the learning acquired during a usual school year.
Stairway to Elite?: Economic and Educational Intergenerational Mobility in Mexico. (with Kathleen Binkewicz)
This paper investigates the relationship between educational and economic positional intergenerational mobility in a developing country. Our findings suggest that individuals with upward educational positional mobility rank approximately two deciles higher in economic resources than those without such mobility, while those with downward mobility rank about one decile below those who do not experience educational positional mobility. For individuals starting at the bottom quintile of the economic distribution, experiencing upward educational positional mobility translates into a 15 pp lower probability of remaining there in adulthood than the reference group. In comparison, those who experience downward mobility have a 12pp higher probability of remaining in the same quintile than the positionally immobile. The reverse pattern occurs in those who start at the top quintile. We find suggestive evidence that the link between positional educational and economic mobility is the changes in occupational status, as those who experience upward educational mobility are more likely to climb in the occupational status scale, and when they do, they are also more likely to experience upward economic mobility than the rest of the population, even when they experience upward occupational mobility.
Apples to Oranges: Imputing Household Income Using Survey Data (with Pedro Torres & Roberto Vélez-Grajales)
Accurate measures of household income are essential for socioeconomic research and policymaking, but survey data often lack income information. Two common approaches to mitigate this problem are asset-based indices and survey-to-survey imputations. Asset-based indices reflect long-term consumption patterns, which show less variance and inequality than income. Survey-to-survey imputations, particularly through the multiple imputation procedure, predict the income distribution in such surveys. This procedure introduces a potential source of bias in inequality of opportunity analysis by randomly adding error terms to the prediction to recover some of the variance lost in the prediction process, thus randomly shifting individuals in the conditional income distribution with respect to variables not used in the prediction, such as parental background. We propose an alternative imputation method that considers individuals' relative predicted position in the distribution to introduce variance. We validated our method across ENIGH survey waves and found it robust across different specifications. Finally, we apply it to the EMOVI 2017 and compare it with an asset index-based approach and the traditional imputation technique. We find a downward bias in the multiple imputation procedure when considering IOp estimates compared to our estimation. Our approach provides an alternative solution for imputing income data that avoids shifting individuals in the conditional (on circumstances) income distribution.
Missing Mothers: The Impact of Excluding Mothers' Socioeconomic Standing on Estimates of Intergenerational Mobility (with Juliana de Castro Galvao and Luisa Nazareno)
Measuring Intergenerational Poverty Transmission with Retrospective Data.
The Great Capital and Labor Divide. Compositional Inequality in Latin America (with Marco Ranaldi)
Precarious Employment in Mexico in the XXIst Century (with Kate Moody)
The Intergenerational Mobility of Single-Mother Children: Evidence from Mexico
Unfair Inequality in the Tropics.
Measuring Multidimensional Unfair Inequality.