Ensaios sobre a oferta de trabalho das mulheres no meio rural do Brasil

Abstract

This dissertation presents two independent essays about labor supply of women in rural Brazil. The first article analyzes the relationship between fertility and women's participation in the labor market in rural Brazil, using data from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD 2014). In order to study this relationship, considering the endogeneity, and to eliminate the bias between fertility and labor supply, the technique of Instrumental Variables (VI) was used, considering the preference of parents for children of different sex as the basis for an instrument. This was used by Angrist and Evans (1998) for the United States, and Cruces and Galiane (2003) as external validation for Argentina and Mexico, and in later studies in Brazil, considering the presence of twins and stillbirths by Pazello (2006) and Souza, Rios-Neto and Queiroz (2011). The results suggest that, unlike previous studies (which attempted to understand the relationship between family size and female work for the urban environment) for the case of rural Brazil, it is verified that the increase in the number of children does not change the probability Participation of women in the labor market. The second article analyzes the impact of the Bolsa Família Program (PBF) on the labor supply of beneficiary mothers in rural areas in Brazil, in the face of one of the largest discussions about the program, the 'lazy effect' or ‘replacement effect’. Based on PNAD data (2014), the methodology is based on the use of the Propensity Score Matching (with nearest-neighbor, kernel and IPW criteria) and Ordinary Least Squares on the treatment (beneficiary) and control (non-beneficiary) groups, with application of the sensitivity analysis proposed by Oster (2015). The results showed that the PBF has an opposite effect to the one pronounced in the critiques of the program on the dependence of the beneficiary mothers, because the beneficiaries had more work hours than the non-beneficiaries, this fact can be explained by the value of the benefit not being able to meet the expenses of the household. From these results, we can conclude that both tests reinforce the importance of continuing the investigation of the effects of female labor supply in the rural environment in the light of different guidelines.