Research papers:

Publications:

Heterogeneous Impacts of Commodity Price Shocks on Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence and Theory for the Chilean Mining Sector. Latin American Economic Review (2024), volume 33, article 7


Working papers:

Job-to-Job Transitions: Wage Cuts and Wage Growth. Evidence for a Developing Economy (NEW VERSION!).

I investigate the relation on workers accepting wage cuts when moving job-to-job (JTJ) and a job ladder effect driving this highly frequent phenomenon. Using data from the unemployment insurance registry, I show that job-to-job transitions are positively associated with ex-post wage growth. Besides, conditional on transitioning JTJ, workers who accept wage cuts show higher wage growth rates in their destination firms. These facts are robust to changing the composition of jobs and workers over the business cycle. I rationalize these findings in a structural job search model that features exogenous wage-wage growth offers. Workers maximize the expected present value of moving JTJ or staying in their current firm when a job offer arrives. Overall, the model is able to replicate every stylized fact documented in the empirical section. The evidence that I provide suggests that there is a trade-off between accepting a wage cut and climbing in the job ladder when workers do JTJ transitions. 


Signaling Willingness to Hire through Wage-Setting Mechanisms, with Nicolás Riquelme. (NEW VERSION!).

Workers face uncertainty about the firms' willingness to hire when applying for a job position. The uncertainty affects workers' search and, in turn, labor market outcomes. We show that when the difference in workers' productivity is intermediate, wage-setting mechanisms transmit information to the supply side of the market, affecting workers behavior, and ultimately the equilibrium outcome. In this case, firms with low willingness to hire prefer to ask for wage bids, while firms with high willingness to hire prefer to post wages. This results in lower workers' wage bids, which translates to a lower expected wage and a lower probability of a match, compared with the case with workers facing uncertainty. If the difference in workers' productivity is small, firms prefer to post wages, while if the difference in workers' productivity is high, firms prefer to ask for wage bids.  Thus, information is not transmitted, with no further effects. We formally identify a novel channel for information to flow from firms to workers which may alleviate informational inefficiencies due to mismatches because of search frictions. We discuss the implications of our results to mandatory wage posting policies.

Work in progress: