Recent studies suggest that the increasing supply of college-educated workers in Latin America has reduced returns to skill, as evidenced by the decreasing college premium. We show that the college premium does not accurately represent returns to skill, particularly in...

We estimate high real wage cyclicality using over a decade of online job ads. Our unique, high-quality data—featuring reliable wage rates, firm identifiers, job titles, hiring standards, vacancy counts, and applicant demographics— provides an accurate measure of firms’ marginal labor...

This paper estimates the effects of labor inspections in Brazil. Inspections reduce es-tablishment employment by about 8% within three years, driven mainly by lower hiring, with modest wage declines. Both deterrence and punishment shape these responses: even non-penalized firms contract,...

The Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI) serves as a hub for cutting-edge analysis and research across the entire University of Chicago economics community, uniting researchers from the Booth School of Business, the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, the...

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