Beatriz Pousada

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

My research leverages natural experiments to provide causal evidence on labor market policies. I currently have two main research agendas. The first one focuses on policies aimed at low-wage workers because even though policies aimed at those workers can be especially impactful, research focusing on those low-wage workers is still scarce. My second research agenda focuses on the impact of immigration policy on the host country’s labor market.

My job market paper is about domestic labor outsourcing, such as when a company hires another company to provide cleaning services instead of directly hiring their cleaning workers. This practice has been growing in the last couple of decades, but it has adverse effects on workers' earnings since outsourced workers earn significantly less than insourced workers. I study if the implementation or increase of an occupation-specific minimum wage, which I will call the wage floor from now on, helps reduce this wage penalty incurred by outsourced workers. To estimate the causal effect, I leveraged a natural experiment where Brazil more than doubled its federal minimum wage between 2000 and 2016 and implemented a differences-in-differences strategy. I find that a wage floor increase significantly reduces the outsourced worker wage penalty and reduces outsourced employment but has no significant effect on insourced worker employment.

My other area of research interest is immigration policy and its consequences on the host countries’ labor market. For instance, in a collaboration with Professors Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, and Timothy MacQuade, we characterized the contribution of immigrants to US innovation. My main contribution to this paper was to develop a novel strategy using the USPTO patent dataset to identify immigrants based on the age the inventor received their first SSN. We find that immigrants are more productive than natives as measured by their patent citations and that immigrants create strong positive externalities to their collaborators, while natives have a much weaker impact. Furthermore, I have started to work on another project about immigration that estimates if the large influx of immigrants to Brazil between 1870 and 1920 contributed to the decline in women’s participation in manufacturing during the same period. Contrary to popular belief that immigration hurts low-income workers, my preliminary results show that the increase in immigration actually slowed down the decline in women’s labor force participation in manufacturing. I assemble a novel data set at the state level that covers employment by gender and industry for the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Brazil. I plan on extending this data set to be at the municipality level once I have secured the necessary funds.

Finally, I have a couple of early-stage projects that I am excited to work on in the next three to five years. Following up on my job-market paper about the negative consequences of outsourcing, I plan to research the possible positive consequences of outsourcing. For instance, when a firm decides to outsource an occupation that is not related to the firm’s specialty, the firm can instead focus its resources on occupations related to its main activity. Therefore, in one of my projects, I plan on measuring if firms increase their productivity and wages after they decide to outsource. To do so, I plan on expanding the matched employer-employee data that I use on my job market paper with another data set that contains detailed firm-level information on revenue and costs. Moreover, I plan on studying the contribution of unions to worker welfare, specifically whether the presence of unions contributes to increases in wages and protects workers from getting fired. To do so, I will leverage a policy change that was implemented in Brazil in 2017 that eliminated the mandatory union contribution, which resulted in unions losing economic power.

Projects

• How does the minimum wage affect outsourced workers? Evidence from cleaning workers in Brazil, Stanford University

  This paper provides causal evidence on the effect of implementing or increasing a wage floor (an occupation-specific minimum wage) on the wage difference between outsourced, insourced, and informal workers, the employment of outsourced and insourced workers, and the size of the informal labor market. To do so, I use matched employer-employee data from Brazil focusing on the labor market for cleaning workers. Brazil has regional occupation-specific wage floors that increased in response to yearly federal minimum wage increases that affected all regions and occupations starting in 2000. Since regions with lower wage floors were much more affected, to estimate the causal effect, I compare regions with lower wage floors in 1999 against regions with higher wage floors in 1999. Estimation results show that a 23% wage floor increase, the average real increase between 2000 and 2010, decreases the outsourced wage penalty in half. This reduction in the wage gap makes outsourced workers relatively more expensive than insourced workers, which reduces outsourcing employment by 70%. The majority of this reduction in outsourced worker employment comes from less entry of new outsourced workers or from workers transferring into formal jobs in other occupations, and only the minority comes from workers leaving the formal labor market. Finally, I find no significant effect on informal worker employment and a 40% reduction in the informal wage penalty.

  Location

  Stanford University

  For More Information:

  • Job Market Paper
• The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States

  We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing the first five digits of 236 million of Social Security Numbers (SSN). By combining this part of the SSN together with year of birth, we identify whether individuals are immigrants based on the age at which their Social Security Number is assigned. We find that over the course of their careers, immigrants are more productive than natives, as measured by number of patents, patent citations, and the economic value of these patents. Immigrant inventors are more likely to rely on foreign technologies, to collaborate with foreign inventors, and to be cited in foreign markets, thus contributing to the importation and diffusion of ideas across borders. Using an identification strategy that exploits premature inventor deaths, we find that immigrants collaborators create especially strong positive externalities on the innovation production of their collaborators, while natives have a much weaker impact. We identify a key mechanism driving these differences: the unique knowledge backgrounds of immigrants. This suggests that combining different knowledge pools into inventor teams is important for innovation.

  Location

  Stanford University

  Collaborators

  • Shai Bernstein, Marvin Bower Associate Professor, Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School
  • Rebecca Diamond, Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business
  • Timothy McQuade, Associate Professor, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

  For More Information:

  • paper
• Women's Labor Market Participation in Brazil's Early Industrialization, Stanford University

  In this paper, I estimate if the large influx of immigrants to Brazil between 1870 and 1920 contributed to the decline in women's participation in manufacturing employment that happened during the same period. To do so, I assemble a novel country-wide data set that covers employment by gender and industry for the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Brazil. To estimate the causal effect, I used a shift-share instrument similar to Card (2001). It predicts the influx of immigrants by assuming that immigrants of a specific nationality are more likely to settle in states that already have a large population from their home country. My results show that if the immigration rate were to increase by 28.83 percentage points (one standard deviation) the change in the proportion of women working in manufacturing between 1872 and 1920 would have increased from -14.6 to -6.2 percentage points. This indicates that, counterintuitively, the increase in immigration actually slowed down the decline in women's labor force participation in manufacturing.

  Location

  Stanford University

  For More Information:

  • paper

Work Experience

• Research Assistant, UCL (June 1, 2021 - September 30, 2021)

  Research Assistant for Prof. Gabriel Ulyssea and Prof. Clement Imbert, University College London (UCL)
  Project: “The effects of severe climate shocks on internal displacement and its impacts on economic development”

  Location

  London (remote)

• Research Assistant, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business (GSB) (June 1, 2019 - September 30, 2020)

  Research Assistant Prof. Shai Bernstein, Stanford University
  Project: “The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States”

  Location

  Stanford, California

• Research Assistant, Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro (January 15, 2016 - June 15, 2017)

  Research Assistant for Prof. Claudio Ferraz at PUC-Rio
  Projects: “Do Government Audits Reduce Corruption? Estimating the Impacts of Exposing Corrupt Politicians”; “Procuring Firm Growth: The Effects of Government Purchases on Firm Dynamics”

  Location

  Rio de Janeiro

• Research Assistant, Institute of Economic Research Foundation (FIPE) (January 15, 2014 - December 15, 2014)

  Research Assistant at Institute of Economic Research Foundation (FIPE).
  Supervisors: Prof. Gabriel de Abreu Madeira; Prof. Mauro Rodrigues Jr.; Prof. Rafael Coutinho Costa Lima; Prof. Sergio Almeida.
  Projects: a Program evaluation of “Banco do Povo” a micro-credit program of the State of São Paulo.

  Location

  Sao Paulo