Performance in the Brazilian Labor Market: the flow of persons and resources

• Grant number: 17/17827-6
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: December 01, 2017
• End date: May 31, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics - Quantitative Methods Applied to Economics
• Principal Investigator: Ana Luísa Gouvêa Abras
• Grantee: Ana Luísa Gouvêa Abras
• Host Institution: Centro de Engenharia, Modelagem e Ciências Sociais Aplicadas (CECS). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project will produce three empirical articles that will deal with contemporary problems of the Brazilian economy. In the first article, we will study the substitution of customer service in a retail bank made by attendants for the online service of Twitter and Facebook. We will test whether customer-bank interaction through social media results in a higher profit margin when compared to the traditional interaction using telephone operators in a call center. The work will use propensity score matching to pair up similar clients who used different media. In the second article, we contribute to the literature that analyzes affirmative action policies in Brazil. We will measure the performance differential between quota and non-quota students at Federal University of ABC. Although the UFABC was conceived in 2006 with quotas and financial assistance, students who entered through the quota system present lower average grades than their peers. In the third article, we study the impact of credit expansion and financial deepening on local employment growth between 1995 and 2015. We leveraged the Central Bank Monthly Banking Statistics database with statements from all banks in the country to build a shift-share credit shock series purged of the effect of local demand. The credit shock will be used as an instrumental variable in a model that relates the growth rate of formal employment to the growth rate of bank credit at the regional level. (AU)