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 policies in the world—the Brazilian Emergency Aid (EA)—impacted poverty, inequality, and the labor market 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 as 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. Absent the policy, adverse shocks would have been significant and are likely to 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.

Although vast, most research on gender earnings gaps uses cross-sectional data for year-round full-time workers; therefore, little is known about the dynamics of gender inequality in lifetime earnings. To address this lacuna, this article analyzes data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1968 to 2017, to investigate the extent, trends and explanations of gender inequality in lifetime earnings both within and across five 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 shows that this stalled gender convergence is driven by increasing gender earnings inequality throughout the prime working years of those born in the 1960s and 1970s. Decomposition of the lifetime earnings gap further reveals that gender differences in the number of hours worked throughout one’s working life 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 has become a less relevant factor in explaining earnings differences for younger generations. These findings draw attention to the value of examining gender inequality as a cumulative long-term process.

For decades, educators and policy makers have decried low graduation rates at U.S. 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-forprofits, 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.