Abstract. The causes and consequences of the intergenerational persistence of inequality are a topic of great interest among various fields in economics. However, until now, issues of data availability have restricted a broader and cross-national perspective on the topic. Based on rich sets of harmonized household survey data, we contribute to filling this gap computing time series for several indexes of relative and absolute intergenerational education mobility for 18 Latin Ameri can countries over 50 years, and making them publicly available. We find that intergenerational mobility has been rising in Latin America, on average. This pattern seems to be driven by the high upward mobility of children from low-educated families; at the same time, there is substantial immobility at the top of the distribution. Significant cross-country differences are observed and are associated with income inequality, poverty, economic growth, public educational expenditures and assortative mating.JE L D63, I24, J62, O15.

We study the behavior of female labor force participation (LFP) over the business cycle by estimating fixed effects models at the country and population-group level, using data from harmonized national household surveys of 18 Latin American countries in the period 1987-2014. We find that female LFP follows a countercyclical pattern-especially in the case of married, with children and vulnerable women-which suggests the existence of an inverse added-worker effect. We argue that this factor may have contributed to the deceleration in female labor supply in Latin America that took place in the 2000s, a decade of unusual high economic growth.

Background: This paper presents new evidence of the inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio (the percentage of total inequality that was extracted by global elites) of Latin America (LA) in the last two decades. Moreover, we explore the relevance of the inequality extraction ratio (IER) in the analysis of social conflict, institutional instability and corruption. Methods: Estimation of IER and Gini index for 18 Latin American countries in the period 1990-2013, using household surveys. Estimation of multivariate econometric models with fixed effects to analyze the relationship between income distribution and indicators of social conflict. Results: AL improves two positions in the ranking of global inequality using the IER instead of Gini index. Within Latin America there is a process of convergence in levels of inequality, but the two measures evolve differently: while the Gini index increases in the 90s and decreases in the 2000s, the IER decreases throughout the entire period. In addition, we found a positive association between IER and social conflict. Conclusions: Using the IER, LA is not as unequal as with the Gini index. Moreover, countries in LA with high rates of IER are more likely to have high levels of social conflict.

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Estas cifras surgen de la base SEDLAC (Socioeconomic Database for Latin America and the Caribbean, CEDLAS y Banco Mundial), que incorpora los microdatos de las encuestas de hogares de los países de la región procesadas de manera tal de hacer las estadísticas comparables entre países y a través del tiempo mediante el empleo de definiciones similares para las variables y aplicando métodos de procesamiento de datos consistentes (ver SEDLAC, 2016).

We explore the role of social mobility as a driver of economic development. First, we map the geography of intergenerational mobility of education for 52 Latin American regions, as well as its evolution over time. Then, through a new weighting procedure that considers the participation of cohorts to the economy in each year, we estimate the impact of changes in mobility on regional economic indicators, such as income per capita, poverty, child mortality, and luminosity. Our findings show that increasing social mobility had a significant and robust effect on the development of Latin American regions.

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Co-director: Leonardo GaspariniResumen El objetivo principal del trabajo es analizar el rol del crecimiento económico en la desaceleración de la PLF que se dio en América Latina a inicios de la década del dos mil. Para ello, se evalúa la relación entre el ciclo económico y la PLF mediante estimaciones de modelos econométricos con efectos fijos, usando datos para 18 países en el período 1987-2014. Se encuentra que la PLF sigue un patrón contracíclico, especialmente para las mujeres más vulnerables, lo que puede ser explicado por el efecto de trabajador adicional. Asimismo, se aporta evidencia de que la cobertura de programas de transferencias condicionadas es otro factor relevante asociado a la desaceleración de la PLF. AbstractThe paper analyzes the role of economic growth in female LFP deceleration that occurred in Latin America since the 2000s. Thus, we asses the relationship between business cycle and female LFP estimating econometric models with fixed effects, using data of 18 countries during 1987-2014. We found that the female LFP follows a countercyclical pattern, especially for vulnerable women, which may be explained by the additional worker effect (AWE). Furthermore, we provide evidence that the coverage of CCTs is another important factor associated with the deceleration of the female LFP. JEL classification: J22, J16, N3