Intergenerational mobility in the land of inequality

Abstract

The dissertation comprises two papers on social mobility in Brazil. The first (Chapter 1) is coauthored with Diogo Britto, Alexandre Fonseca, Paolo Pinotti, and Breno Sampaio and provides the first estimates of intergenerational mobility of income (IGM) in Brazil using administrative registries and income tax data. Besides characterizing mobility in great detail, the chapter also proposes new approaches to deal with informal income measurement – a central issue to study mobility in developing countries but until now largely neglected by the literature, focused on developed countries. The chapter presents a snapshot of the distribution of opportunities for children born in Brazil at the end of the 1980s, depicting higher income persistence and lower mobility than in developed countries. In turn, Chapter 2 is a solo-authored draft of ongoing work which pretends to proceed from a snapshot to a film. Specifically, it presents the first results of a project aiming to assess the effect of large social programs on IGM. In particular, the chapter uses similar populational datasets to the previous paper to estimate the long-term impacts of Programa Bolsa Fam ́ılia (PBF), the largest conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in the world. Despite preliminary, results suggest that children who had exposure to PBF accumulate more years of education, display better labor market outcomes, and have lower rates of teenage pregnancy, social welfare receipt, and incarceration. In doing so, PBF promoted social mobility and contributed to a decrease in regional inequality within the country.