Marcos A. Rangel

Alimony Rights and Intrahousehold Allocation of Resources: Evidence from Brazil

Can family policy affect well-being of individuals without altering the resources available to their families? This article examines the extension of alimony rights and obligations to cohabiting couples in Brazil. For women in intact relationships, alimony rights upon dissolution should improve outside options, strengthening their negotiating positions, and increasing their influence over intrahousehold allocation of resources. Robust econometric evidence indicates that more decision power in the hands of women impacts hours worked by female adults and investments in the education of children. This suggests that family policy and models of family decision making should take intrahousehold heterogeneity of preferences into account.

On the Blurring of the Color Line: Wages and Employment for Black Males of Different Skin Tones

We evaluate the role skin color plays in earnings and employment for black males in the NLSY97. By applying a novel, scaled measure of skin tone to a nationally representative sample and by estimating the evolution of labor market differentials over time, we bridge a burgeoning literature on skin color with more established literatures on wage differentials and labor market discrimination. We find that while intraracial wage gaps widen with experience, gaps between the lightest-skinned black workers and whites remain constant, suggesting that a blurring of the color line elicits subtle yet meaningful variation in earnings differentials over time.

Is Parental Love Colorblind? Human Capital Accumulation within Mixed Families

Studies have shown that differences in wage-determinant skills between blacks and whites emerge during a child’s infancy, highlighting the roles of parental characteristics and investment decisions. Exploring the genetics of skin-color and models of intrahousehold allocations, I present evidence that, controlling for observed and unobserved parental characteristics, light-skinned children are more likely to receive investments in formal education than their dark-skinned siblings. Conscious parental decisions regarding human capital acquisition for their children seem to contribute for the persistence of earnings differentials and socio-economic stratification in Brazil.

Village Economies and the Structure of Extended Family Networks

Abstract This paper documents how the structure of extended family networks in rural Mexico relates to the poverty and inequality of the village of residence. Using the Hispanic naming convention, we construct within-village extended family networks in 504 poor rural villages. Family networks are larger (both in the number of members and as a share of the village population) and out-migration is lower the poorer and the less unequal the village of residence. Our results are consistent with the extended family being a source of informal insurance to its members.

Economic Assimilation and Skill Acquisition: Evidence From the Occupational Sorting of Childhood Immigrants

We study the economic assimilation of childhood immigrants to the United States. The linguistic distance between English and the predominant language in one’s country of birth interacted with age at arrival is shown to be closely connected to occupational sorting in adulthood. By applying big-data techniques to occupations’ detailed skill requirements, we provide evidence that childhood immigrants from English-distant countries who arrived after the primary school years reveal comparative advantages in tasks distinct from those for which (close to) Anglophone immigrants are better suited. Meanwhile, those who arrive at younger ages specialize in a bundle of skills very similar to that supplied by observationally equivalent workers. These patterns emerge even after we net out the effects of formal education. Such findings are compatible with the existence of different degrees of complementarity between relative English-learning potential at arrival and the acquisition of multiple capabilities demanded in the U.S. labor market (math/logic, socioemotional, physical, and communication skills). Consistent with the investment-complementarity argument, we show that linguistic distance and age at arrival also play a significant role on the choice of college major within this population.

Racial Achievement Gaps in Another America: Discussing Schooling Outcomes and Affirmative Action in Brazil

A negative association between African ancestry and measures of socioeconomic success in regions colonized by Europeans can be considered an empirical regularity across the social sciences. In the USA, Brazil, and South Africa, for example, the intense trade of African slaves by English and Portuguese colonizers and the Dutch displacement of indigenous populations made the color of one’s skin an indicator of European ancestry and made it play a key role in social stratification. Most studies document the presence of this historically rooted stratification and uncover racial differences in a variety of contexts, even in the presence of sharp differences in patterns of economic development, enforcement of civil rights, and institutional arrangements regarding racial segregation. In this chapter, we explore the recent evidence of racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes in Brazil. We then trace these differences to income-generating capabilities materialized in an uneven accumulation of human capital (formal education in particular) by Black and White adult Brazilians. We also explore unique and novel data on school transitions and proficiency for the case of the Brazilian southeastern state of Sao Paulo in order to establish general stylized facts in education trends among younger cohorts. The discussion that follows is centered on the assessment of color-blind and color-sighted policies that suggest a closing (but not the elimination) of racial gaps in both the quantity and the quality of education.

Does Voting Have Upstream and Downstream Consequences? Evidence from Compulsory Voting in Brazil

Economists, political scientists, policy-makers, and practitioners have long examined voting: paying a great deal of attention to questions like, “who votes?”, “why do people vote?”, and “how can we get more people to vote?” However, few have considered whether getting people to vote changes their broader attitudes and non-voting behaviors. In this paper, we use Brazil’s compulsory voting system to consider the effect of a large exogenous increase in voting on young citizens’ political interest, associational memberships, social awareness, and political knowledge in the lead up to the first compulsory voting experience (“upstream”) and in the months after (“downstream”). Using a unique, large dataset and a quasi-experimental strategy based on an exact-date-of-birth discontinuity design, we show that voting has little to no upstream or downstream effects on measurable attitudes, values and non-voting behaviors. These results suggest that while voting may be an important behavior in its own right, it may have much smaller transformative effects over the average individual than previously thought.