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This paper aims to measure income differences between the obese and the non-obese for Brazil and understand which components explain these differences.

A decomposition method based on recentered influence functions, proposed by Firpo et al. (2007) is used, and the procedure is applied to individuals' income distribution quantiles.

The results confirm the existence of a wage gap between obese and non-obese men and women. In the case of men, the difference was favorable to the obese in all quantiles and in the case of women, favorable to the non-obese. The biggest differences were observed at the top of the distribution. This difference is mostly explained by observable characteristics that cause the wage gap between groups. The wage structure effect, which may have elements associated with discrimination in its composition, was not relevant in most quantiles.

Unobserved factors can impact the results, but our methodology tries to minimize such impact.

The authors can only observe a point in time and with that they do not know how long the individual has been obese.

The methodology adopted in the work is recent; moreover, studies on the effects of obesity on the labor market are still recent in Brazilian research.

This paper investigates the relationship between (1) business cycle and use of personal contacts to obtain job and (2) use of personal contacts to obtain job and wages.

For this, we use data from the Monthly Employment Survey (2002–2015) from Brazil which has detailed information on individual and job characteristics. In addition, we investigate the impact of referrals on wage using quantile regressions.

Time-varying parameter estimates indicate that the relationship between business cycle and use of personal contacts became less countercyclical over time. In general, they show that there is more evidence of a slow changing relationship between personal contacts and the business cycle over time rather than a sudden and discrete one. Using quantile regressions, we observed that, controlling for similar observable characteristics, and including unobserved heterogeneity, wage differences between workers using personal contacts versus workers using others channels disappear. The evidences indicate that workers resort to personal contacts because of valuation of non-pecuniary job characteristics.

The results suggest that, in designing subsidy or affirmative action programs, attention to network effects is important. Social networks can help labor markets run more smoothly by alleviating information frictions.

This study extends the existing literature by providing empirical evidence of the use of personal contacts for the Brazil. Although there are many studies and methods for measuring use of personal contacts, to our knowledge, there are no studies using a time-varying parameters model.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of family structure on child labor by comparing children of nuclear families headed by the father with children of single-mother families headed by the divorced mother.

This paper uses data from Brazilian urban areas provided by the Brazilian Demographic Census of 2010. The empirical approach consists of the estimation of three treatment effect models: the Average Treatment Effect, IV Treatment Effect and Two-Stage Estimator proposed by Lewbel (2012).

The main findings show that children of single-mother families headed by divorced mothers are more likely to work, compared to children living with both parents. This paper found evidence of a direct effect of family structure parents’ determinant on child participation in labor. The main hypothesis is that the absence of the father paired with exposure to family stress arising from marital dissolution is an indicator toward child labor.

This study implies that in order to combat child labor effectively, it is important to understand deeply its several causes and consider ruptures in family structure, such as divorce, as one of these factors. In addition, location and family’s characteristics also play a role on the decision of child labor. For instance, boys living at metropolis areas have less chance to work. Family’s head education and non-work income affects positively the child well-being by reducing the probability of child labor. On the other hand, the number of siblings increases the chance of child labor. Finally, the results of this study suggest policies to raise awareness among parents about the negative effects of child labor on children during both childhood and adulthood, and that social policies need to act beyond legislation and enforcement, but including family mobilization.

This paper estimates the impact of family structure on child labor using an empirical approach to deal with the endogeneity problem of the treatment.