Sérgio Pinto

Sergio Pinto is a PhD student at the School of Public Policy and his primary research interests are centered on income inequality, subjective well-being, and labor economics.

His current work spans different subject areas and geographies, covering both the US and Portugal. Together with his advisor, Carol Graham, he has analyzed race and income-based heterogeneities in subjective well-being markers, and how they map into premature mortality trends. They have also published in Science on how the factors that matter most for well-being depend on which dimension we are considering, and how well-being can matter for policy. Currently, they are investigating the particular unhappiness of prime age men who drop out of the labor force and, in a separate project and with other co-authors, they are assessing the causal well-being impact of recent US presidential elections. In separate work - still at an early stage – they are the negative well-being effects of mass shootings in the US. In Portugal, he is focusing on a number of topics related to labor markets and inequality. One of the current projects seeks to quantify the trends in wage inequality and intra-generational wage mobility in Portugal, with particular attention to the top of the distribution. A second project seeks to estimate firm market power and quantify its impact on worker wages and inequality. Finally, he is also in the preliminary stages of analyzing the impacts of recent minimum wage increases on worker and firm outcomes.

Prior to starting his PhD, Sergio worked at international organizations such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as in the public and private sector of my home country.`