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This study investigates the role of race, family background and education in earnings inequality between whites and the African descendent population in Brazil. It uses quantile Mincer earnings regressions to go beyond the usual decomposition of average earnings gaps. Differences in human capital, including parental education and education quality, and in its returns, account for most but not all of the racial earnings gaps. There appears to be greater pay discrimination at the higher salary jobs for any skill level. Returns to education vary with the gradient of skin color. While returns are similar for white and mixed race workers at the top of the adjusted wage scale, mixed race workers at the bottom are rewarded similar to blacks. Thus, while equalizing access to quality education is key to reduce racial earnings inequality in Brazil, specific policies are also needed to facilitate equal access of non‐whites to good quality jobs.

Introduces a collection of papers originally presented at the 79th Applied Econometrics Association Conference which was organised with the specific aim of stimulating discussion on the “econometrics of wages”. Topics of particular focus include gender wage gaps and wage discrimination. The papers provide insight into the magnitude and sources of gender, racial and sexual orientation earnings inequalities.

While awaiting resolution of their legal process, undocumented migrants (UM) face several challenges, including limited access to public health care. The purpose of this paper is to survey UM attending a detention centre in Oporto (Portugal) to estimate the prevalence of mental health disorders in this population.

A retrospective chart review was performed with the relevant sociodemographic and clinical data of all UM in the process of coercive removal from Portuguese territory, observed by Doctors of the World, during three years (2014–2016). The Tenth Version of International Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders was used for nosological classification.

In total, 393 detainees were eligible for the study. Most detainees were male (84 per cent) and 76 months was the mean length of stay in Portugal before detention. In total, 29 per cent of detainees were diagnosed with a mental and behavioural disorder. The most prevalent diagnosis was neurotic, stress-related and somatoform disorders (47 per cent). UM with dual diagnosis (28 per cent) led to the articulation with the integrated centres of drug addiction, which provided and monitored opioid substitution therapy. Female UM were more prone to develop any mental and behavioural disorder when compared to men (χ²=7,017; p<0.05).

In total, 9 per cent of the detainees were excluded from this study due to incomplete data on their medical charts. Some detainees presented oppositional behaviour, hostility towards others and refused to be assessed by the medical team. Both situations could have biased the prevalence of mental disorders. Finally, the appropriateness of the western model of mental health disorders (ICD-10) in the study population is controversial, considering the culture-bound phenomenology and syndromes.

This paper identified the most prevalent mental health disorders in UM detained in Portugal. The most prevalent mental health disorders were either stress-related (associated with the detention itself) or related to previous patterns of substance abuse. Given the study outcomes, it is highly recommended to mobilise human and technical resources to provide specialized mental health care to UM at least while detention policies could not be changed.

This work presents a topology optimization methodology for designing microarchitectures of phononic crystals. The objective is to get microstructures having, as a consequence of wave propagation phenomena in these media, bandgaps between two specified bands. An additional target is to enlarge the range of frequencies of these bandgaps.

The resulting optimization problem is solved employing an augmented Lagrangian technique based on the proximal point methods. The main primal variable of the Lagrangian function is the characteristic function determining the spatial geometrical arrangement of different phases within the unit cell of the phononic crystal. This characteristic function is defined in terms of a level-set function. Descent directions of the Lagrangian function are evaluated by using the topological derivatives of the eigenvalues obtained through the dispersion relation of the phononic crystal.

The description of the optimization algorithm is emphasized, and its intrinsic properties to attain adequate phononic crystal topologies are discussed. Particular attention is addressed to validate the analytical expressions of the topological derivative. Application examples for several cases are presented, and the numerical performance of the optimization algorithm for attaining the corresponding solutions is discussed.

The original contribution results in the description and numerical assessment of a topology optimization algorithm using the joint concepts of the level-set function and topological derivative to design phononic crystals.