Publications in Peer-Reviewed Journals
de Castro Galvao, Juliana. 2023. "Gender Inequality in Lifetime Earnings" Social Forces 101(4):1772–1802.
Abstract: Although vast, most research on gender earnings gaps use cross-sectional data for year-round full-time workers, therefore little is known about dynamics of gender inequality in lifetime earnings. To address this lacuna, this article uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1968 to 2017, to investigate the extent, trends and determinants of the gender lifetime earnings gap both within and across five different birth-cohorts born between 1930 and 1979. I find that the lifetime gap sharply declined until the 1960s birth-cohort, with little change thereafter. Unpacking trends throughout the lifecycle reveals that this stalled gender convergence is driven by increasing gender earnings inequality throughout prime-working-years of those born in the 1960s and 1970s. Decomposition of the lifetime earnings gap further reveals that gender differences in number of hours worked throughout one’s working lifetime is a more important factor for younger rather than older generations – despite gender convergence in lifetime labor force attachment across cohorts. On the other hand, gender inequality in stop-outs during early-career have become a less relevant factor towards explaining earnings differentials for younger generations. These findings draw attention to the value of examining gender inequality as a cumulative long-term process.
Nazareno, Luísa and Juliana de Castro Galvao. 2023. "The Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers on Poverty, Inequality, and Employment During COVID-19: A Case Study from Brazil." Population Research and Policy Review 42(2):22.
Abstract: The policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic varied widely between countries. Understanding how effective these responses were is important to improve preparedness for future crises. This paper investigates how one of largest-scale conditional cash transfer COVID relief policy in the world – the Brazilian Emergency Aid (EA) – impacted poverty, inequality, and labor market indicators amidst the public health crisis. We use fixed-effects estimators to analyze the impact of the EA on labor force participation, unemployment, poverty and income at the household level. We find that inequality measured by per capita household income reduced to a historical low and was accompanied by substantial poverty declines – even compared to pre-pandemic levels. Furthermore, our results suggest that the policy has effectively targeted those in most need – temporarily reducing historical racial inequalities – while not incentivizing reductions in labor-force participation. However, absent the policy, adverse shocks would have been significant and will likely occur once the transfer is interrupted. We also observe that the policy was not enough to curb the spread of the virus, suggesting that cash transfers alone are insufficient to protect citizens.
Zapatka, Kasey and Juliana de Castro Galvao. 2023 "Affordable Regulation: Rent Stabilization as a Housing Affordability Policy" City and Community. 22(1), 48–73.
Abstract: The growing housing affordability crisis is at the center of conversations about US inequality. This paper reconsiders the role of rent stabilization as one important affordability tool. We investigate who is most likely to benefit from rent stabilization, how much non-stabilized renters would save if their units were stabilized, and the extent to which stabilization would reduce rent burden among households. Using New York City Housing Vacancy Survey data and employing logistic and hedonic regression techniques, we show that Hispanic and foreign-born householders are more likely to live in rent-stabilized units and we find evidence of both rent savings and rent burden reduction when comparing stabilized tenants with their non-stabilized counterparts. We argue that expanded rent stabilization could be paired with policies that stimulate new construction to simultaneously curb rent inflation, protect current populations from displacement, and increase housing supply.
Juliana de Castro Galvao, Frederick Tucker, and Paul Attewell. "Bending the Curve and the College Completion Agenda: Graduation Rates as a Measure of College Success?” Higher Education Policy
Abstract: For decades, educators and policy makers have decried low graduation rates at US colleges, advocating policies and making investments to improve graduation. We analyze a decade of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data for four-year colleges to investigate how much institutions have improved their graduation rates from 2008 through 2018, once controlling for institutional and student-body characteristics. We find substantial improvement to graduation rates at public colleges, modest improvement at private not-for-profits, and a decline in graduation at the for-profit sector. We then investigate whether improvements to graduate rates are associated with variation in student-body composition, selectivity, and institutional expenditures, using pooled cross-sectional, Prais–Winsten, and college fixed-effect models. We find that most between-college variation in graduation rates over time reflects variation in the composition of a college’s student body and in instructional expenditures. Our Bending the Curve metric utilizes the cross-sectional models to calculate predicted graduation rates for each college and determines how much they exceeded or failed to meet expectations. Unadjusted graduation measures, such as IPEDS’ rates that fail to adjust for these compositional factors, are poor indicators of institutional effectiveness and can mislead stakeholders who use them as an indicator of college performance.
Medeiros, Marcelo, Juliana de Castro Galvão, and Luísa de Azevedo Nazareno. 2018. “Correcting the Underestimation of Top Incomes: Combining Data from Income Tax Reports and the Brazilian 2010 Census.” Social Indicators Research 135(1):233–44. doi: 10.1007/s11205-016-1498-8.
Abstract: To deal with the problem of underestimation of top incomes in household surveys, we propose a methodology to combine the income distributions of the Brazilian 2010 Census (survey) and of 2010 DIRPF (personal income tax reports). The method consists in estimating a system of non-response weights that uses as frame the tax register and is applied to the top of the distribution. After applying this calibration methodology, we decompose inequality income sources. Correcting survey distributions with tax data increases the contribution of non-labor income to inequality, as the case of the Brazilian Census shows. Changes in the methodology do not affect the results substantially
Medeiros, Marcelo, and Juliana de Castro Galvão. 2016. “Education and Income of the Rich in Brazil.” Dados 59:357–83.
Abstract: This article examines the extent to which education can be considered one of the main determinants of wealth in Brazil. Using date pertaining to the specific university education from the 2010 Census Sample, it focuses on the 1% richest within the distribution of income. The main conclusion is that education may be important in explaining total inequality, but there is no evidence that mass education is one of the most relevant factors in explaining the differences between the rich and the rest of the Brazilian population. Not even elite education can be considered a main determinant of current levels of wealth. Therefore a significant portion of total inequality cannot be reduced by educational policy.
Working Papers
"How do men's and women's returns to family events impact household income inequalities in the long-term?"
Abstract: Extensive research highlights the contrasting impacts of family events on men’s and women’s labor market outcomes, yet much of this work centers on individual-level consequences, neglecting the family as a key site of social stratification. This study examines within-family economic inequality across the life course using household panel data from six countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and South Korea. Employing an event study design with fixed-effects and fixed-effects individual slopes models, I estimate the effects of marriage and parenthood on within-family economic inequality across the life course. Results reveal that, apart from South Korea, childbirth—not marriage—is the primary driver of within-couple economic inequalities. Among Western countries, the United States stands out as the only context where disposable household income does not significantly decline after the birth of a first child. For U.S. women with more than a high school degree, household incomes are higher after parenthood. In contrast, in other Western nations, household incomes drop significantly after childbirth and remain lower for over a decade. These findings demonstrate that men’s economic returns from family formation and country-level redistribution policies fail to fully offset motherhood earnings penalties. This study sheds light on the role of parenthood and country contexts in shaping both intra-couple and long-term family economic inequalities.
"Black-White Economic Inequality Over the Lifetime: An Intersectional Decomposition Across Six Cohorts of Individuals and Families" (with Charlotte O'Herron)
Abstract: The stubborn persistence of racial economic inequalities in the U.S. in the last five decades despite major institutional shifts toward promoting racial equality is a puzzle that has garnered extensive research attention. The bulk of the scholarship on the topic has focused on labor income gaps among Black and white men in full time employment. Inequalities in earnings across the life course, in household incomes, and among women have been given much less attention. In this study we adopt a life course approach to provide a comprehensive picture of the extent, patterns, and explanations for Black-white lifetime economic inequality by gender across six generations born between the 1930s and 1980s in the United States. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID: 1970-2019), our findings reveal that, for both men and women, inequality in lifetime earnings and in lifetime household disposable per capita income followed an inverse U-shaped pattern, with lower gaps in the 1930s and 1940s generations, increasing in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by a decline. Then, among men in particular, inequality in lifetime economic outcomes again substantially increased for the 1980s generation, reaching its highest level. Decomposition results show that this inequality surge is attributable to increasing inequality in accumulated human capital, occupational segregation, and an increase in the unexplained portion of the lifetime earnings gap. Additionally, we find that while lifetime earnings gaps are larger among men than women, the opposite is observed for household income gaps, which are more racialized than gendered. However, the components of inequality in lifetime household incomes differ by gender, including differences in observable characteristics, particularly in productive variables (e.g., human capital), accounting for a larger fraction of the lifetime income racial gap among men than they do among women, until the 1980s cohort. Results shed light on the long-term process of reproduction of Black-white inequalities in the United States and how these processes differ by gender.
“Missing Mothers - the Impact of excluding mothers’ socioeconomic standing on estimates of intergenerational mobility in middle-income countries” (with Luisa Nazareno and Luis Monroy-Gómez-Franco)
Abstract: This study investigates the dynamics of economic intergenerational persistence in Brazil and Mexico. We extend prior research by extending focus from the ubiquitous father-son dyads to incorporate mothers, daughters, and family income into the analysis to provide a comprehensive picture of intergenerational mobility in these two countries that combined account for about half of Latin America’s population. We use a Two-Sample, Two-Stage Least Squares (TS2SLS) estimation technique to measure the correlation between the offspring’s and parent’s earnings/income. Our results reveal that estimates which include mother's socioeconomic standing present higher mobility levels than those based solely on father-son correlations. Being a teenager in a single-mother household has a significant negative impact on adult's earnings, however, mobility is higher among this group. We argue for the importance of including women (mothers and daughters) in mobility estimates to paint a comprehensive picture of society-wide levels of intergenerational mobility, particularly considering women's rising labor force participation rates.
"Economic Inequality and Gender: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis?"
Abstract: Despite surging concerns with rising economic inequality, scholarship on the topic has largely overlooked gender. This study investigates trends in gender disparities across the earnings distribution in countries with contrasting trajectories of overall economic inequality. Using Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data, I compare English-speaking countries (Australia, UK, US), where economic inequality has risen since the late 1970s, with Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay) which experienced declining inequality in the 2000s. Findings from Unconditional Quantile Regression (UQR) decomposition models show gender earnings inequality patterns shifting in opposite directions. In English-speaking countries, top-end gender inequality exceeded bottom-end inequality in 2018, reflecting slower reductions in unexplained gaps at the top. Conversely, in Latin America, bottom-end inequality had surpassed top-end inequality, driven by increasing wage structure effects favoring men. Analyses of the composition of gender inequality reveals that women remain underrepresented at the top and overrepresented at the bottom of the earnings distribution, although the magnitude of these disparities varies significantly across contexts. Notably, women's representation at the top is lowest in countries where top earnings imply "global elite" membership, regardless of overall country-levels of economic inequality. This study highlights the need for intersectional, context-sensitive policies to address the reproduction of inequalities across diverse economic landscapes.