In 2006, the Bolsa Família Program completed its expansion, expecting to cover 11 million beneficiary families. The objective of this article is to evaluate whether this implied in deterioration in the program's efficient targeting and whether the target of 11 million families in fact covers...

Our objective is to analyze the gravity of panel attrition in the Brazilian Monthly Employment Survey (PME). There are three types of panel attrition: a) random, that does not produce any selection bias; b) function of observables, whose bias can be corrected through an appropriate re-weighing...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the length of poverty spells and its determinants. We analyze if short-term changes in the labor market affect the probability of staying in poverty. On the assumption that poverty transitions occur more frequently when we use a monthly data rather than...

The panel data of the Brazilian Monthly Employment Survey - Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego (PME/IBGE) is actually one of the richest datasets for analysis of labor market in Brazil. The reason is its longitudinal design. Since it is only addressed to labor market investigations, its questionnaire...

The purpose of this article is to explain how to use the Pesquisa Mensal de Emprego (PME) and in particular to explain in detail how to set up the household panel. The PME household panel is an extremely useful analytical instrument that has been sadly underused due to several practical...

This discussion paper presents a methodology to visualize the effects of various influences on the income distribution. The methodology, although not new, has become very popular in the past few years. It is the method of counterfactual simulations. In other words, it is the use of "what if...

This text decomposes the earnings differential between white men, on the one hand, and black men, white women, and black women, on the other. A difference in earnings may arise due to at least three causes: difference in human capital, different insertions in the labor market, or pure difference...

Any discussion on professional training and labor market insertion must take into account the social vulnerability of the Brazilian population. Close to 16 million families fall within the criteria of Bolsa Familia`s Single Registry. Seventy-two (72) million people live in these families, but...

This text discusses the Bolsa Família Program, its institutional design, implementation issues, its impacts and possibilities for future evolution. We discuss the institutional division of responsibilities, benefits, conditionalities and federative arrangements. With regards to implementation...

This text argues that the criteria used to define Bolsa Família benefits and the criteria used to establish coverage targets are inconsistent. While individual concession criteria are that beneficiaries should be paid for two years if they do not suffer large upward income mobility, the...