Effects of Labor Market Regulation for Underprivileged Workers: Evidence from Brazil.

This paper analyses the impact of a Brazilian reform that guaranteed for domestic workers the same labour rights that other employees already had access to. In 2013, the first change was to establish a limit to weekly working hours and the obligation to pay overtime. Two years later, other rights became enforceable after the implementation of a system that unified payroll taxes and social contributions to be collected by domestic workers' employers. We analyse the institutional reform through a difference-in-differences approach controlling for individual fixed effects. The analysis is carried out with microdata from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey from 2012 through 2016. Our results suggest that the policy induced a small reduction in working hours and had no effect on wages or formality. Impacts on the transition from domestic labour to unemployment after the reform are found, but they are not robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]