The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Ellora Derenoncourt for this session, where she will share her work.

Ellora Derenoncourt is Associate Professor of Economics at Princeton University and faculty director of the Program for Research on Inequality.

She received her PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Her research lies in labor economics and economic history, with a focus on inequality, including racial disparities, the role of minimum wages, and the long-run evolution of wealth and mobility.

Event Topic:

Minimum Wages and Informality

How do minimum wages affect informality? We study the near-doubling of the real minimum wage from 2000 to 2009 in Brazil, where 46% of the workforce is informal. Using labor force surveys covering the informal sector, we show that the minimum wage increases wages for informal employees, with an effect about two-thirds the size of that on formal employees. Wage gains are especially pronounced in areas with greater enforcement capacity, among industries with a low share of informality, and for informal workers with more outside options in the formal sector. We estimate muted effects of the policy on formality: a 10% gain in formal sector wages due to the minimum wage is associated with 2.8% of formal workers reallocating to other forms of employment. Examining heterogeneity across workers, reallocation is smaller precisely where wage gains to informal workers are larger, a pattern that contrasts with many existing models of informality.

Event Details:

Date: 6 November 2026
Time: 14:00–15:15

Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.

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