Paula Cesana

This paper explores intergenerational mobility in the context of Chile, an economy with an important informal labor market. I start by documenting two key empirical facts. First, labor informality is associated with higher income uncertainty, even after controlling for education and occupation. Second, an individual's labor informality is associated with their family background and, in particular, education and occupation intergenerational persistence account for a large portion of this association. Next, I propose a two-period model of human capital investment and occupation choice under uncertainty. In the model, greater income uncertainty reduces parental investment, leading to lower human capital in children, which increases the likelihood of informal work in the next generation. A counterfactual exercise shows that reducing parental income risk improves upward mobility and reduces informality. These findings underscore the role of income uncertainty in shaping future labor market outcomes and perpetuating barriers to intergenerational mobility.

This paper explores how differences in the adoption of task-biased technologies contribute to GDP gaps across countries. We introduce a country-specific measure of task intensity to quantify the relative importance of tasks within occupations, which can be readily applied in quantitative analysis. Using this measure, we show that as GDP increases, the share of routine work declines while cognitive work increases. Moreover, differences in task content within specific occupations explain more than half of the cross-country differences in routine work. We then develop a production framework where technology is task-specific, and occupations are aggregates of tasks, with which we rationalize both optimal task and occupational demands. We use this model to quantitatively assess the differences in task-biased technology adoption across countries and its implications for GDP gaps. Our main counterfactual exercise shows that closing the dispersion in task productivity adoption reduces the average GDP gap relative to the United States by around 25%.