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

de Castro Galvao, Juliana "Policy Environments and Within-Couple Inequality in Labor Market Outcomes Across the Life Course" 

Abstract: While within-couple inequality features in many narratives of effective policy design for promoting gender equality in labor market outcomes, the association between policies and within-couple inequalities, particularly in the context of life course dynamics, has been surprisingly absent from the literature. This study proposes a life course approach to within-couple inequalities to illuminate how gender inequality in returns to family events (e.g., marriage and parenthood) shapes long-term inequalities in couples' labor market outcomes and impacts families' economic standing. Using an original collection of country-level panel data and cross-nationally-harmonized household panel data, I investigate the life course dynamics of within-couple inequalities in labor market outcomes across six industrialized countries (the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, and South Korea). A life course approach to the study of within-couple inequalities in cross-national perspective is central to illuminate why gender inequalities persist and to unravel the policies that can promote long-term equality and well-being.  

de Castro Galvao, Juliana "Economic Inequality and Gender: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis?"

Abstract: Despite surging concerns with rising economic inequality, the academic scholarship on the topic— particularly increasing top-income shares—have been largely gender-blind. Building on theories of labor market dynamics and on the scholarship of gender and work, I investigate how the gender composition, level, and labor market participation dynamics have changed across socioeconomic strata in different scenarios of rising/decreasing overall societal economic inequality. Using harmonized microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database, this research contrasts high-income English-speaking countries (Australia, UK, and US) witnessing rising economic inequality, with Latin American nations (Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay) where economic inequality has declined since the 2000s. I find that women are more underrepresented at the top of the earnings distribution in richer countries, independent of overall economic inequality levels. This finding suggests that barriers to women to enter top-earnings ranks are stronger in countries where membership at the top confers a global elite status. Through quantile regressions and decomposition techniques, I show how measures of central tendency hide important dynamics of gender inequality. I find that the shape of inequality changed in opposite directions between the two sets of countries. For English-speaking countries, by 2018, gender earnings inequality was higher at the top of the earnings distribution than the bottom. In Latin America the opposite trend is generally observed: bottom-end gender earnings inequality had by the late 2010s surpassed top-end inequality. These findings call for greater attention to the role of macroeconomic factors in shaping gender and economic class inequalities.

de Castro Galvao, Juliana ”How do Institutions Shape Long-Term Cross-National Differences in Gender Inequality?” 

Abstract: Despite the shift in work-family policies from the male-breadwinner to the dual-earner model in all industrialized countries in the 1970s, gender earnings inequality persists to varying degrees across countries. In this paper I use harmonized household panel datasets available through the Cross-national Equivalent File (CNEF) for six countries (US, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Australia and Korea) to investigate how different socioeconomic and policy configurations shape long-run gender inequality in earnings and number of hours worked, net of individual- and country-level unobserved heterogeneity. Prior studies, based largely on cross-sectional data, have been limited in their ability to support causal claims and to address long-term gender labor market inequalities. The rich household panel datasets analyzed in this paper allows for the use of more robust statistical estimation techniques than prior research. The findings reveal that welfare state aversion is associated with higher earnings and work commitment for men, but not women. As such, institutional shifts towards more regressive welfare state provisions tends to increase gender inequalities. These findings highlight the importance of institutions in mediating between-group inequalities, even once accounting for deeply rooted country-level institutions (such as, to a certain extent, gender norms).

Manuscripts in Preparation 

“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)