Income Risk Asymmetries over Argentina’s Business Cycle

Abstract

This paper explores the aggregate income risk of formal workers in Argentina, using a longitudinal database that contains information on approximately half a million formal employees in the private sector for a span of twenty years. We estimate quantile regression models to measure the sensitivity of real wages to the business cycle along the conditional and unconditional labor earnings distribution, thus capturing the asymmetry of aggregate economic impacts on wages. The main result is that income risk decreases along the conditional and unconditional labor earnings distribution, showing that individuals located at the lower part of the distribution are more exposed to the fortunes of the aggregate economy. In addition, low-income individuals suffer a stronger fall in wages when economy declines than the increase that their experiment when business cycle is in its expansion phase, which, in a very volatile economy like Argentina, implies a deterioration over time of their remuneration.