ESSAYS ON EDUCATION AND LABOR MARKETS IN LATIN AMERICA

This dissertation studies the labor market effect of different educational policies in Latin America. The first two chapters are focused on a market level analysis. The first chapter develops a framework to evaluate the labor market effects of different types of educational expansions in four labor market outcomes: (1) the occupational structure of employment; (2) the assignment of workers with different level of education to occupations; (3) the wage level for each educational group; and (4) the wage gaps between educational groups. I evaluate three policy experiments consistent on increasing secondary schooling, increasing higher education, and increasing both. In the second Chapter, I apply the framework to study the case of Brazil, a country that underwent a major educational expansion during the period 1995-2014. I provide some new stylized facts for Brazil on the inter-linkages between changes in education, occupations, and wages over the period of 1995-2014— changes in outcomes (1)-(4). I found that: (a) the occupational structure of employment improved, but that improvement was very small when compared to the extension of the educational expansion; (b) the conditional occupational attainment declined for each educational group—primary or less, secondary, and university; (c) and average wages increased but not for all educational groups since wages of primary educated workers increased while wages of more educated workers declined; (d) there were large reductions in inequality as measured by educational wage gaps. Then, I show that the model’s predictions for the Brazilian educational expansion are qualitatively consistent with the patterns observed in the data. I further demonstrate that, after calibrating the model, the educational expansion in Brazil was of utmost importance for generating the observed quantitative changes in the labor market. In the last chapter, I moved from a market level to an individual level analysis to evaluate the effect of a negative educational shock on workers’ lifetime earnings. In particular, I examine how school disruptions caused by teacher strikes in Argentina affect students’ long-run outcomes by exploiting cross-cohort variation in the prevalence of teacher strikes within and across provinces in Argentina in a difference-in-difference framework. I find robust evidence that teacher strikes worsen the future labor market outcomes of students when they are between 30 and 40 years old