Ieda Matavelli Publications

We document employment preferences of workers at the margin of informality using open-ended questions and discrete choice experiments in Brazil’s largest favela complex. Stated preferences emphasize pay and tangible job benefits rather than meaning or purpose, while primary complaints center on poor management, customers, and inflexible schedules. Workers exhibit high valuations for all formal sector amenities on average—unemployment insurance, parental leave, and termination notice—as well as for learning opportunities, but lower for non-formal sector amenities such as shorter commutes. Valuations vary systematically by employment sector in ways consistent with sorting: formal workers value formal amenities most, the self-employed value them least or not at all, and the informally employed exhibit mixed valuations. These patterns are also consistent with learning and endowment effects, for which we find suggestive evidence.

We evaluate the effects of mandatory disclosures of firm-specific gender wage gaps in Brazil—the first developing country to enact a large-scale pay transparency law. The mandate took effect in 2023, automatically releasing to the public government-curated reports showing firm-specific gender wage gaps, separately by major occupational groups, for formal sector firms with 100 employees or more. Regression discontinuity estimates on outcomes one year after the release show that the mandated disclosures had no effects on the gender wage ratio, average wages for men or women, or the number of occupations within firms. We document that gender wage gaps persist in the formal sector as of year-end 2024, with women earning 10% less than men on average after conditioning on a flexible vector of observables, including hours worked, work experience, years of education, and occupation codes. Gender wage gaps increase with firm size for all occupational groups except production workers, which are male-dominated and have stronger union presence. Two major employer associations and a political party have challenged the legality of the policy at the Supreme Court, arguing that the mandated disclosures violate data protection rules, expose commercially sensitive wage data constituting trade secrets, conflict with existing labor legislation that permits legitimate wage differentials, and impose penalties without due process. We hypothesize two non-mutually-exclusive channels for the null effects: information frictions—workers may not receive, understand, or find actionable the technical reports—and labor market frictions—workers may be unable to act on information given limited outside options and high transition costs in Brazil’s frictional labor market.