Alfonso Miranda, CIDE

About the Presentation

In this paper we use experimental vignettes to study how a worker's personal demographic characteristics affect stated employment and wage setting decisions among the personnel of a random sample of Mexico City's service sector firms. We explore the effect of sex, skin tone and hair color, face symmetry —as a proxy for beauty or attractiveness— and country of origin. We find a discriminatory employment penalty of 13% from Central and south America workers as well as a penalty for workers with asymmetric faces of 5\%, net of a explicit productivity measure. For wages, we find only weak evidence that migrants from Central and South America are offered lower wages than native workers in the Mexican labour market. Finally, we find strong evidence of a sex wage penalty: women are offered wages that are about 6.6% lower than those offered to men. 

About the Speaker

Alfonso Miranda is a Professor of Economics at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), México; and director of the Program for Longitudinal Studies, Experiments and Surveys (PANEL). He holds a BSc degree in Economics at the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM) (Hons), and MSc and PhD degrees in Economics at the University of Warwick, UK. He is member of the National System of Researchers of Mexico level III (since January 2019), and member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences (since 2018). Alfonso is also a research fellow at the Institute for the study of Labor (IZA), Germany; research fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO); and research affiliate at the Health Econometrics and Data Group of the University of York, UK.

Before joining CIDE in August 2012, he was a Lecturer in Social Statistics (tenured) at the the Department of Quantitative Social Science, Institute of Education, University of London, UK (2008-2012). And Lecturer in Economics (tenured) at Keele University, UK (2004-2008).

Alfonso research interests include the use and development of methods for the estimation of nonlinear econometric models for cross-section and panel data and its applications to demographic, education, health, and labour economics. Recently he has worked on topics relating longitudinal survey design and experimental economics; with emphasis in sampling and experimental design. In particular, in 2017 he launched, along a group of other researchers, the Aguascalientes Longitudinal Study of Child Development (EDNA); which is study of 1,000 children in 100 schools who are a representative sample of the cohort of children that started first grade of primary education in August 2016 at a public school of Aguascalientes, Mexico. EDNA intends to identify, and contribute to change, the problems that Mexican children face to achieve a healthy physical and mental development in their way to adult life.

Location ONLINE VIA ZOOM:  Zoom Registration Link.  Registration link will be available approximately one week prior to the seminar.  Upon registration you will receive an automatically generated email with the direct link for the seminar.

COVID-19 Information

MPRC public events for Spring 2022 will be a mix of in person and online via Zoom.  For in person events, all event attendees must follow current protocols