School-to-Work Transition in Brazil and the US

This project is a collaboration among scholars from the University of Michigan, Columbia University, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and the Graduate Institute in Geneva. By leveraging comparative and historical approaches, it seeks to understand how distinct school-to-work institutional arrangements affect earnings and racial inequalities in Brazil and the US.

The project has two main components. First, using Census data available for the past 60 years in Brazil, the project traces how educational stratification processes have affected inequality patterns over time in the country. Second, it compares school to work patterns in Brazil and the US, particularly contrasting the experiences of Brazilian and American black professionals when leaving the educational system and entering the labor market. Though it uses data from the Brazilian and US Censuses independently, the project builds on a careful harmonization effort of detailed educational and occupational categories, which allows for a careful (and to our knowledge the first systematic) cross-country comparison.