Escolhas individuais e bem-estar financeiro: três ensaios utilizando microdados

Como orientar políticas públicas de modo a promover o bem-estar da população? Para responder a essa questão a comunidade acadêmica tem enfocado a necessidade de se conhecer melhor as escolhas de consumo individuais. Essa tendência encontra apoio no número, cada vez maior, de bases de microdados disponibilizadas pelos órgãos governamentais e iniciativa privada. O presente trabalho analisa as escolhas dos brasileiros com relação às decisões de financiamento e de oferta de trabalho. O estudo é dividido em três ensaios empíricos distintos. Como a contratação de crédito em mercados informais é motivada pelo déficit de educação financeira é o foco do primeiro ensaio. Considerando mais de 2.000 observações sobre tomadas de crédito, utiliza-se um modelo logit multinomial para estimar a propensão à tomada de crédito na informalidade em contraste com o crédito bancário. Os resultados indicam que a educação financeira pode ter uma relevância maior para a seleção de financiamentos informais do que a restrição de crédito. O segundo ensaio analisa o comportamento de uso de cartões de crédito dentre 1.458 jovens adultos residentes no Brasil, EUA ou França. Um modelo de equações estruturais é utilizado para incorporar relações entre as variáveis latentes. O modelo validado pelo estudo representa uma situação em que o bem-estar financeiro é afetado pela forma com que o indivíduo utiliza o cartão de crédito que, por sua vez, é afetado pelo sentimento de comparação social e pela autoconfiança financeira, essa última sendo impactada também pela educação financeira recebida dos pais. Na comparação entre grupos encontramos evidências de que a comparação social tem um efeito mais forte sobre os jovens brasileiros e que homens são mais dependentes da educação dos pais do que as mulheres. No último ensaio a população pobre brasileira é analisada em relação a um suposto efeito preguiça, que seria causado pela diminuição de oferta de trabalho das famílias que recebem o benefício financeiro do governo via o Programa Bolsa Família. Um modelo de sobrevivência foi usado para comparar a duração no emprego entre beneficiários do programa e um grupo controle, utilizando uma base de dados com mais de 3 milhões de indivíduos. A hipótese de um efeito preguiça é rejeitada. O risco de desligamento do emprego para os beneficiários do Bolsa Família é medido como sendo de 7% a 10% menor, o que é capaz de anular, por exemplo, o maior risco de saída do emprego causado pela presença de filhos pequenos na composição familiar. Uma vez que a rotatividade no emprego dificulta o recebimento de aposentadorias por tempo de contribuição, pode-se concluir que o programa de transferência de renda brasileiro terá um impacto positivo sobre o bem-estar financeiro futuro do trabalhador.

Chronic disease burden and human capital investment: evidence from the chagas disease campaign in Brazil

We investigate the effects of augmented life expectancy and health improvements on human capital investment, labor supply and fertility decisions. Our main motivation is the prediction of human capital theory that a longer and healthier life encourages educational investment and female labor force participation, while discouraging fertility. To assess the magnitude of these effects, we explore a national campaign against Chagas disease in Brazil as an exogenous source of adult mortality decline and improvement in health conditions. We show that, relative to non-endemic areas, previously endemic regions saw higher increases in educational investment, measured by literacy, school attendance and years of schooling, following the campaign. Additionally, we find that labor force participation increased in high prevalence areas relative to low prevalence ones. Furthermore, we estimate a substantially higher effect on female labor force participation relative to male, suggesting that longevity gains and health improvements affected women's incentives to work, encouraging women to join the labor force. We do not find significant effects on fertility decisions.

Brazilian indexing and inertial inflation: evidence from time-varying estimates of an inflation transfer function

This paper is a theoretica1 and empirica1 study of the re1ationship between indexing po1icy and feedback mechanisms in the inflationary adjustment process in Brazil. The focus of our study is on two policy issues: (1) did the Brazilian system of indexing of interest rates, the exchange rate, and wages make inflation so dependent on its own past values that it created a significant feedback process and inertia in the behaviour of inflation in and (2) was the feedback effect of past inf1ation upon itself so strong that dominated the effect of monetary/fiscal variables upon current inflation? This paper develops a simple model designed to capture several "stylized facts" of Brazi1ian indexing po1icy. Separate ru1es of "backward indexing" for interest rates, the exchange rate, and wages, reflecting the evolution of po1icy changes in Brazil, are incorporated in a two-sector model of industrial and agricultural prices. A transfer function derived irom this mode1 shows inflation depending on three factors: (1) past values of inflation, (2) monetary and fiscal variables, and (3) supply- .shock variables. The indexing rules for interest rates, the exchange rate, and wages place restrictions on the coefficients of the transfer function. Variations in the policy-determined parameters of the indexing rules imply changes in the coefficients of the transfer function for inflation. One implication of this model, in contrast to previous results derived in analytically simpler models of indexing, is that a higher degree of indexing does not make current inflation more responsive to current monetary shocks. The empirical section of this paper studies the central hypotheses of this model through estimation of the inflation transfer function with time-varying parameters. The results show a systematic non-random variation of the transfer function coefficients closely synchronized with changes in the observed values of the wage-indexing parameters. Non-parametric tests show the variation of the transfer function coefficients to be statistically significant at the time of the changes in wage indexing rules in Brazil. As the degree of indexing increased, the inflation feadback coefficients increased, while the effect of external price and agricultura shocs progressively increased and monetary effects progressively decreased.

Money supply and capital accumulation on the transition path revisited

Fischer (1979) and Asako (1983) analyze the sign of the correlation between the growth rate of money and the rate of capital accumulation on the transition path. Both plug a CRRA utility (based on a Cobb-Douglas and a Leontief function, respectively) into Sidrauski's model - yet return contrasting results. The present analysis, by using a more general CES utility, presents both of those settings and conclusions as limiting cases, and generates economic gures more consistent with reality (for instance, the interest-rate elasticity of the money demands derived from those previous works is necessarily 1 and 0, respectively).

Elasticity of substitution between capital and labor: a panel data approach

This paper estimates the elasticity of substitution of an aggregate production function. The estimating equation is derived from the steady state of a neoclassical growth model. The data comes from the PWT in which different countries face different relative prices of the investment good and exhibit different investment-output ratios. Then, using this variation we estimate the elasticity of substitution. The novelty of our approach is that we use dynamic panel data techniques, which allow us to distinguish between the short and the long run elasticity and handle a host of econometric and substantive issues. In particular we accommodate the possibility that different countries have different total factor productivities and other country specific effects and that such effects are correlated with the regressors. We also accommodate the possibility that the regressors are correlated with the error terms and that shocks to regressors are manifested in future periods. Taking all this into account our estimation resuIts suggest that the Iong run eIasticity of substitution is 0.7, which is Iower than the eIasticity that had been used in previous macro-deveIopment exercises. We show that this lower eIasticity reinforces the power of the neoclassical mo deI to expIain income differences across countries as coming from differential distortions.

Skilled labor, unskilled labor, and economic growth

We assess the effects of the imperfect substitution between skilled and unskilled labor on economic growth in a model in which physical capital and skilled labor can be accumulated. It is shown that economies with higher substitutability between skilled and unskilled labor have higher levels of income per capita in the transition and in the long-run equilibrium. Furthermore, these economies have a higher level of skilled labor and a higher level of capital intensity in the long-run equilibrium. For certain parameters values, the speed of convergence depends positively on the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labor.

Optimal Mirrleesian taxation in non-competitive labor markets

We study optimal labor income taxation in non-competitive labor markets. Firms offer screening contracts to workers who have private information about their productivity. A planner endowed with a Paretian social welfare function tries to induce allocations that maximize its objective. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for implementation of constrained efficient allocations using tax schedules. All allocations that are implementable by a tax schedule display negative marginal tax rates for almost all workers. Not all allocations that are implementable in a competitive setting are implementable in this noncompetitive environment.