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Dive into the research topics where Guillermo Cruces is active.

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Featured researches published by Guillermo Cruces.


Journal of Public Economics | 2013

Biased Perceptions of Income Distribution and Preferences for Redistribution: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

Guillermo Cruces; Ricardo Perez-Truglia; Martin Tetaz

Individual perceptions of income distribution play a vital role in political economy and public finance models, yet there is little evidence regarding their origins or accuracy. This study examines how individuals form these perceptions and posits that systematic biases arise from the extrapolation of information extracted from reference groups. A tailored household survey provides original evidence on the significant biases in individuals’ evaluations of their own relative position in the distribution. Furthermore, the data supports the hypothesis that the selection process into the reference groups is the source of those biases. Finally, this study also assesses the practical relevance of these biases by examining their impact on attitudes towards redistributive policies. An experimental design incorporated into the survey provides consistent information on the own ranking within the income distribution to a randomly selected group of respondents. Confronting agents’ biased perceptions with this information has a significant effect on their stated preferences for redistribution. Those who had overestimated their relative position and thought of themselves relatively richer than they were demand higher levels of redistribution when informed of their true ranking. This relationship between biased perceptions and political attitudes provides an alternative explanation for the relatively low degree of redistribution observed in modern democracies.


Economica | 2011

Recent Trends In Income Inequality In Latin America

Leonardo Gasparini; Guillermo Cruces; Leopoldo Tornarolli

This paper documents patterns and recent developments on income inequality in Latin America (LA). New comparative international evidence confirms that LA is a region of high inequality, although maybe not the highest in the world. Income inequality has fallen in the 2000s, suggesting a turning point from the substantial increases of the 1980s and 1990s. The fall in inequality is significant and widespread, but it does not seem to be based on strong fundamentals.


Social Science Research Network | 2011

Educational upgrading and returns to skills in Latin America : evidence from a supply-demand framework, 1990-2010

Leonardo Gasparini; Sebastian Galiani; Guillermo Cruces; Pablo Acosta

It has been argued that a factor behind the decline in income inequality in Latin America in the 2000s was the educational upgrading of its labor force. Between 1990 and 2010, the proportion of the labor force in the region with at least secondary education increased from 40 to 60 percent. Concurrently, returns to secondary education completion fell throughout the past two decades, while the 2000s saw a reversal in the increase in the returns to tertiary education experienced in the 1990s. This paper studies the evolution of wage differentials and the trends in the supply of workers by educational level for 16 Latin American countries between 1990 and 2000. The analysis estimates the relative contribution of supply and demand factors behind recent trends in skill premia for tertiary and secondary educated workers. Supply-side factors seem to have limited explanatory power relative to demand-side factors, and are only relevant to explain part of the fall in wage premia for high-school graduates. Although there is significant heterogeneity in individual country experiences, on average the trend reversal in labor demand in the 2000s can be partially attributed to the recent boom in commodity prices that could favor the unskilled (non-tertiary educated) workforce, although employment patterns by sector suggest that other within-sector forces are also at play, such as technological diffusion or skill mismatches that may reduce the labor productivity of highly-educated workers.


Labour Economics | 2010

Payroll taxes, wages and employment: Identification through policy changes

Guillermo Cruces; Sebastian Galiani; Susana Kidyba

This paper investigates the effect of changes in payroll taxes on wages and employment in Argentina. The analysis, based on administrative data, focuses on the impact of a series of major changes in payroll taxes which varied across geographical areas. This setup offers two main advantages over previous studies. First, using longitudinal data, the variation in tax rates across space and time provides a plausible source of identification of their effects on employment and wages. Second, the use of legal tax rates for each area at each point in time provides a remedy for the measurement error bias raised by the use of empirical rates constructed from observed tax and wage bills. Once this bias is accounted for, the results indicate that changes in payroll tax rates are only partially shifted onto wages, and they point to the absence of any significant effect on employment.


Journal of Political Economy | 2017

Partisan Interactions: Evidence from a Field Experiment in the United States

Ricardo Perez-Truglia; Guillermo Cruces

This paper exploits the unique institutional setting of U.S. campaign finance to provide new evidence on social incentives in political participation. We conducted a field experiment in which letters with individualized information about campaign contributions were sent to 91,998 contributors in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The effect of those letters on recipients’ subsequent contributions are examined using administrative data. We find that exogenously making an individual’s contributions more visible to her neighbors significantly increased her subsequent contributions if the majority of her neighbors support her same party, but decreased her contributions if the majority of her neighbors support the opposite party. This constitutes evidence that individuals give preferential treatment to neighbors of the same party. In another treatment arm, we randomized the information observed by recipients about their neighbors’ contribution behavior. Consistent with existing evidence on social norms, individuals contribute more when neighbors of the same party contribute higher average amounts. Furthermore, we find that individuals also care about the total amounts raised by the same and opposite parties. These findings have implications for the design of optimal disclosure policies, for the understanding of geographic polarization and for fundraising strategies. JEL Classification: C93, D03, D64, D71, D72, D83, H41.


Documentos de Trabajo del CEDLAS | 2010

Payroll Taxes, Wages and Employment: Identification Through Policy Changes

Guillermo Cruces; Sebastian Galiani; Susana Kidyba

This paper investigates the effect of changes in payroll taxes on wages and employment in Argentina. The analysis, based on administrative data, focuses on the impact of a series of major changes in payroll taxes which varied across geographical areas. This setup offers two main advantages over previous studies. First, using longitudinal data, the variation in tax rates across space and time provides a plausible source of identification of their effects on employment and wages. Second, the use of legal tax rates for each area at each point in time provides a remedy for the measurement error bias raised by the use of empirical rates constructed from observed tax and wage bills. Once this bias is accounted for, the results indicate that changes in payroll tax rates are only partially shifted onto wages, and they point to the absence of any significant effect on employment.


Research Department Publications | 2008

Quality of Life in Buenos Aires Neighborhoods: Hedonic Price Regressions and the Life Satisfaction Approach

Guillermo Cruces; Andrés Ham; Martin Tetaz

This paper studies quality of life in urban neighborhoods in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. First, hedonic price regressions for residential prices are augmented with neighborhood characteristics, based on a real estate database with indicators on each property’s distance to public facilities and amenities, and on a smaller survey with greater detail. Second, following recent developments in the field of happiness research, the document assesses the importance of different neighborhood characteristics on quality of life by interacting objective and subjective indicators. Indices of quality of life related to local amenities are derived for the different neighborhoods for both the hedonic regression and life satisfaction approaches. The results indicate a strong but not perfect correlation between real estate prices, income levels and neighborhood characteristics, suggesting scope for welfare-improving policy interventions.


Archive | 2004

Perceptions of inequality and risk

Frank A. Cowell; Guillermo Cruces

This paper analyses the principles underlying the theories of risk and inequality, and the connections between the two. Using two experimental designs, we investigate the structure of individuals’ rankings of uncertain prospects in terms of risk and inequality. We examine these individual perceptions in the light of the conventional principles underlying risk and inequality. We show that, although the principle of mean-preserving spreads and the principle of transfers are often rejected a weaker principle, “lowest-to-highest” is usually supported.


Labor and Demography | 2003

Generalizing the Causal Effect of Fertility on Female Labor Supply

Guillermo Cruces; Sebastian Galiani

We study the effect of fertility on labor supply in Argentina and Mexico exploiting a source of exogenous variability in family size first introduced by Angrist and Evans (1998) for the United States. Our results constitute the first exte rnal validation of the estimates obtained for the US. External validation of empirical results is centr al to the making of rigorous science, but there are very few attempts to establish it. We find th at the estimates for the US can be generalized both qualitatively and quantitatively to the populati ons of two developing countries where, compared to the US, fertility is known to be higher, female education levels are much lower and there are fewer facilities for childcare.


Brookings Papers on Economic Activity | 2016

Learning from Potentially Biased Statistics

Alberto Cavallo; Guillermo Cruces; Ricardo Perez-Truglia

When forming expectations, households may be influenced by perceived bias in the information they receive. In this paper, we study how individuals learn from potentially biased statistics using data from both a natural experiment and a survey experiment during a period (2007–15) when the government of Argentina was manipulating official inflation statistics. This period is interesting because attention was being given to inflation information and both official and unofficial statistics were available. Our evidence suggests that, rather than ignoring biased statistics or naively accepting them, households react in a sophisticated way, as predicted by a Bayesian learning model. We also find evidence of an asymmetric reaction to inflation signals, with expectations changing more when the inflation rate rises than when it falls. These results could also be useful for understanding the formation of inflation expectations in less extreme contexts than Argentina, such as the United States and Europe, where experts may agree that statistics are unbiased but households are not.

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Leonardo Gasparini

National University of La Plata

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Marcelo Bergolo

National University of La Plata

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Leopoldo Tornarolli

National University of La Plata

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Maria Laura Alzua

National University of La Plata

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Diego Battistón

London School of Economics and Political Science

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Adriana Conconi

National University of La Plata

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