Diego Battistón

COULD AN INCREASE IN EDUCATION RAISE INCOME INEQUALITY ?: EVIDENCE FOR LATIN AMERICA

This paper explores the direct ef fect of an education expansion on the level of earnings inequality by carrying out microsimulations for most Latin American countries. We find that the direct ef fect of the increase in years of education in the region in the 1990s and 2000s was unequalizing; this result is expected to hold for future expansions if increases in education are not highly progressive. Both facts are closely linked to the convexity of returns to education in the labor market. On average, the estimated impact of the education expansion remains unequalizing when allowing for changes in returns to schooling, although the ef fect becomes smaller.

Chapter 1 Refining the basic needs approach: A multidimensional analysis of poverty in Latin America

Latin America has a longstanding tradition in multidimensional poverty measurement through the unsatisfied basic needs (UBN) approach. However, the method has been criticized on several grounds, including the selection of indicators, the implicit weighting scheme and the aggregation methodology, among others. The estimates by the UBN approach have traditionally been complemented (or replaced) with income poverty estimates. Under the premise that poverty is inherently multidimensional, in this chapter we propose three methodological refinements to the UBN approach. Using the proposed methodology we provide a set of comparable poverty estimates for six Latin American countries between 1992 and 2006.

Face-to-Face Communication in Organisations

Communication is integral to organisations and yet field evidence on the relation between communication and worker productivity remains scarce. We argue that a core role of communication is to transmit information that helps co-workers do their job better. We build a simple model in which workers choose the amount of communication by trading off this benefit against the time cost incurred by the sender, and use it to derive a set of empirical predictions. We then exploit a natural experiment in an organisation where problems arrive and must be sequentially dealt with by two workers. For exogenous reasons, the first worker can sometimes communicate face- to-face with their colleague. Consistently with the predictions of our model we find that: (a) the second worker works faster (at the cost of the first worker having less time to deal with incoming problems) when face-to-face communication is possible, (b) this effect is stronger when the second worker is busier and for homogenous and closely-located teams, and (c) the (career) incentives of workers determine how much they communicate with their colleagues. We also find that workers partially internalise social outcomes in their communication decisions. Our findings illustrate how workers in teams adjust the amount of mutual communication to its costs and benefits.