RESUMO
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had an immediate and severe impact on the economy. However, we do not know whether the disease may have a longer-term effect on people's employment opportunities. In this study, we focus on the effects of COVID-19 infection on labor market outcomes 12 months after diagnosis. We use a unique dataset that includes all formal private sector workers in the Mexican social security system and that links health outcomes with administrative records. We implement two alternative identification strategies to estimate the impact: matching estimators and individual fixed effects models. Our study finds that COVID-19 infection does not harm employment probabilities or wages. On the contrary, we find that workers who had tested positive for COVID had a higher likelihood of keeping their formal sector jobs and higher wages than those who did not. Moreover, our results describe mostly low-income workers.
RESUMO
BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic revealed large structural inequalities that led to disparities in health outcomes related to socioeconomic status. So far, most of the evidence is based on aggregated data or simulations with individual data, which point to various possible mechanisms behind the association. To date, there have been no studies regarding an income gradient in COVID-19 mortality based on individual-level data and adjusting for comorbidities or access to healthcare. METHODS: In this paper, we use linked employee-patient data for patients tested for COVID-19 at the Mexican Institute of Social Security. We estimate the association of the probability of dying with income centiles, using a probit estimation and adjusting for COVID-19 diagnosis, sociodemographic variables, and comorbidities. FINDINGS: After controlling for all these variables, we find that persons in the lowest income decile still had a probability of dying from COVID-19 five times greater than those at the top decile. INTERPRETATION: Our results imply that the association between income and COVID outcomes is not explained by the prevalence of comorbidities or by a lack of access to healthcare among the low-income population. FUNDING: This study was not supported by any external funding source.
RESUMO
We analyze the universe of point-of-sale (POS) transactions before and during the COVID-19 lockdown in Mexico. We find three key results. First, consumption in Mexico fell by 23 percent in the April-June quarter of 2020 and by 16 percent from April to September of 2020 as compared to expected levels. Second, reductions in consumption were highly heterogeneous across sectors and states, with states and activities related to tourism the most affected. Third, using variation over time and states, we estimate the elasticity of POS expenditures with respect to geographic mobility (measured using cellphone location data) to be slightly less than 1. This estimate suggests that spending in developing countries may be more responsive to mobility than in developed countries, and that mobility indicators could be used as a real-time proxy for consumption in some economies.
RESUMO
We implement a correspondence audit study that uses a non-paired design to test the effect of obesity on employment discrimination in Mexico. In Mexico it is common practice to include a photograph in a resume, and job advertisements often specify personal and physical characteristics. We use both types of information to evaluate discrimination against the obese and identify its potential channels. We send two fictitious resumes, one of a woman and another of a man, one obese and the other non-obese, in response to advertisements for job openings. The obese photograph is a digital manipulation of the picture of the same non-obese person. We send a total of 3202 resumes in response to 1696 job advertisements. There is clear evidence of discrimination against obese women, but not obese men. The callback rate for the non-obese women is 29.1 %; for obese women it is 21.3 %. The difference is statistically and economically significant. An obese woman would need to send 37 % more resumes to obtain the same number of callbacks as a non-obese woman. We explore different channels that could explain this result, including customer discrimination (employer discrimination based on perception of customer expectations), productivity and salary, the gender of the person making the hiring decision, and the proportion of women in the occupation. We find no strong evidence in favor of any one channel. Advertisements with men identified as the contact person discriminate more than those with women, but replacing those men with women would reduce the observed gap in callback rate no more than 25 %.
Assuntos
Emprego/estatística & dados numéricos , Obesidade/epidemiologia , Preconceito , Adulto , Feminino , Humanos , Masculino , México/epidemiologia , Pessoa de Meia-Idade , Seleção de Pessoal , Salários e Benefícios/estatística & dados numéricos , Fatores Sexuais , Adulto JovemRESUMO
In many Latin American countries, census data on race and skin color are scarce or nonexistent. In this study, we contribute to understanding how skin color affects intergenerational social mobility in Mexico. Using a novel data set, we provide evidence of profound social stratification by skin color, even after controlling for specific individual characteristics that previous work has not been able to include, such as individual cognitive and noncognitive abilities, parental education and wealth, and measures of stress and parenting style in the home of origin. Results indicate that people in the lightest skin color category have an average of 1.4 additional years of schooling and 53 % more in hourly earnings than their darkest-skinned counterparts. Social mobility is also related to skin color. Individuals in the darkest category are 20 percentile ranks lower in the current wealth distribution than those in the lightest category, conditional on parental wealth. In addition, results of a quantile regression indicate that the darkest group shows higher downward mobility.