José Márcio Camargo

Desemprego: o custo da desinformação

The relationship between skill and unemployment rate is an inverted U-shape and youth unemployment rate is 2.5 higher than adult unemployment rate in Brazil. This paper argues that these facts are due to asymmetric information in the labor market. Semi-skilled workers have higher asymmetric information because they are a very heterogeneous group and their educational level offers little information to the employer about the workers productivity ability. The asymmetric information is higher for young workers because some information about the productivity is revealed as the worker accumulates experience in the labor market. Assuming that asymmetric information leads to homogeneous wages, the evidences are consistent with our hypothesis. The employers have less information about the young and semi-skilled productivities and asymmetric information is positively correlated with unemployment rate.

Política social no Brasil: prioridades erradas, incentivos perversos

This article shows that the Brazilian social programs have a tendency pro-elderly and another anti-children, that makes them less efficient in order to reduce the inequality of income and the poverty in the country. The result of such structure of social expenditures has created a mechanism of reproduction of poverty along the years.

Os efeitos da redução da jornada de trabalho de 48 para 44 horas semanais em 1988

The reduction of standard weekly working time from the current level of 44 hours to 40 hours has recently been proposed by the main central unions as a way to create jobs and reduce unemployment in Brazil. The idea, known as work-sharing, is that the reduction in average hours per worker would allow the same tasks to be performed by more employees, a notion which has been challenged in the theoretical and empirical literature. The objective of this paper is to study the effects of the workweek reduction from 48 to 44 hours prescribed by the 1988 Constitution on the Brazilian labor market. We find that the Constitutional changes reduced actual working hours, did not change the probability of the affected worker of becoming unemployed in 1989 (relative to other years), reduced the probability of the affected worker of not having a job in 1989 (which includes those that left the labor force) and implied a relative increase in real hourly wages (although lower than observed for workers that reduced the workweek time in other years). These results suggest that the working time reduction did not have a negative impact on employment in the short run (12 months after the constitutional change).

Desemprego dos jovens no Brasil: os efeitos da estabilização da inflação em um mercado de trabalho com escassez de informação

Apos a estabilizacao da inflacao com o Plano Real em 1994, a taxa de desemprego dos jovens no Brasil aumentou significativamente em relacao aos adultos. De acordo com o argumento proposto neste artigo, a maior rigidez salarial provocada pela estabilizacao da inflacao e o elevado grau de incerteza dos empregadores sobre a produtividade dos trabalhadores mais jovens foram importantes para explicar esse resultado. Como parte das informacoes sobre a produtividade e revelada com a experiencia no mercado de trabalho, a estabilizacao deve ter limitado a capacidade das firmas ajustarem o salario real a medida que adquirem mais informacoes sobre os trabalhadores jovens. Com isso, os ajustes nas situacoes em que a produtividade do trabalhador se revela inferior ao salario real passam a ser feitos atraves do emprego. Usando dados da PNAD para o periodo de 1981 a 2002 sao encontradas evidencias consistentes com esse argumento, ja que reducoes na taxa de inflacao parecem ter aumentado o desemprego e reduzido a duracao media do emprego de todos os grupos etarios, mas de maneira mais acentuada para os trabalhadores jovens.