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Corcuera Garcia, Paul Josemaria

University of British Columbia

This dissertation consists of three distinct chapters in labor economics and applied econometrics. In the first chapter, I use detailed Peruvian social security records combined with firm-level financial data to analyze the impact of a minimum wage increase, enacted in Peru in 2016, on workers and firms, with a focus on the role of the informal sector in explaining these effects. I show that firms facing greater competition from the informal sector find it more difficult to adjust wages or prices in response, and are thus more likely to reduce employment. The second chapter presents a redistribution analysis of the minimum wage increase studied in Chapter 1. I show that low-wage formal employees' purchasing power increased, as the expected change in income is positive and exceeds the expected increase in expenses following the wage hike. I also show that most of the minimum wage pass-through to prices is borne by high-income individuals and households. However, redistribution towards low-income households is limited, as these households are largely composed of informal workers, who are unaffected by this policy. The third chapter proposes a method to estimate the joint cumulative distribution function of treatment effects across multiple outcomes in a difference-in-differences research design and demonstrates the validity of a multiplier bootstrap to construct uniform confidence bands.

Text

2024-09-13

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89247

Economics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/