Hello!
I am Samuel Leyton (Sam)
About Me
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Sophia University in Tokyo.
I received my Ph.D. in Public Economics from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Japan, and I spent one year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica (IEAS) in Taiwan. I also hold a B.A. and an M.A. in Economics from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC), where I spent over two years working as a researcher.
You're welcome to explore my previous and ongoing projects in the research section of this website and to access my CV below.
My Research
My research interests lie in macroeconomics, with a focus on political economy and labor economics. My current projects examine the political economy causes of employment informality and its impact on human capital accumulation, the gender wage gap, and employment.
Publication #1: “Inequality in Pension Contribution Gaps” (with Salvador Valdes-Prieto), Labour Economics, forthcoming.
We examine how gaps in contributions to social insurance vary across the earnings distribution. These gaps have multiple short-term effects on workers in addition to reducing contributory pensions. Using a 14-year panel from Chile, we find that earners in the two lowest wage deciles experience substantially higher gaps, a result that persists after controlling for extensive covariates, including individual fixed effects, and applying instrumental variables. The remaining incidence of earner gaps is a collective attribute of each wage decile that may help guide policy. We also analyze total gaps—which include periods of inactivity—using a 35-year administrative panel. Total gap frequency declines from 91–90% in the lowest decile to 26% in the highest, a larger inequality than in other estimates. We further measure the dispersion of cumulative total gaps over a 20-year horizon from different initial earnings deciles. Finally, we discuss political incentives to reduce earner gaps through closing statutory exemptions and increasing enforcement budgets.
Working Paper #1: "Life Cycle Wage Growth in a Developing Economy: Does Formality Matter?" (with Minchung Hsu)
A new draft is coming soon
This study builds on recent research on international comparisons of wage-experience profiles (eg. Lagakos et al., 2018, and Jedwab et al., 2023), which finds that wage growth is significantly lower in developing economies. We aim to provide a deeper insight into this issue by using data from the Chilean EPS panel survey (from 2002 to 2015) merged with administrative pension contribution records. This is the longest panel dataset available for a developing country, with which we provide a comprehensive analysis of how formal and informal employment experiences contribute to workers' wage growth over the life cycle. We undertake a life-cycle framework with human capital accumulation to guide our empirical strategy. We find that both the speed of human capital accumulation and the return to human capital are significantly lower with informal employment, while the wage growth with formal employment experience is comparable to that in developed economies. This study contributes to the literature by improving the accuracy of estimated experience and investigating the on-the-job human capital accumulation driven by sector-specific experiences.
We also find that the chance of receiving on-the-job training is significantly higher with formal employment which may partially explain the disparity in human capital accumulation between formal and informal employment.
Working Paper #2: "Labor Informality and Redistribution: A Political Economy Equilibrium"
This paper proposes a political economy explanation for high labor informality in developing countries, focusing on the prevalence of jobs without social security coverage: politicians choose not to enforce formality for personal benefit. Our two-period OLG model features heterogeneous agents and two policies determined through probabilistic voting: the amount of a non-contributory basic pension for low-income retired workers funded with income taxes and the degree of enforcement of contributions to a mandatory provident fund (compulsory savings). Due to uncertainty about voters’ ideology, politicians choose policy instrument levels to maximize the weighted welfare of voters. In response to income inequality, politicians increase the basic pension for retired low-income workers, discouraging active workers from saving for retirement. Aligning with worker preferences, politicians relax enforcement of contributions to the provident fund, resulting in a lower labor formality rate. Empirical analysis validates the models' predictions. We highlight the case of Chile's public-sector employees, where a substantial portion is exempt from pension contributions. Additionally, using a panel spanning 65 countries from 1999 to 2019, we establish a robust negative correlation, both cross-country and over time, linking inequality with the labor formality rate.
Work in Progress
“Gender Wage Gap in an Economy with Large Informal Emplyment: Evidence from Chile” (with Minchung Hsu)
“General Equilibrium Effects of Enforcing Employment Formality: Theory and Evidence for Chile” (with Salvador Valdes-Prieto & Francisco Parro)
"Why Does Informality Persist Despite Economic Growth? A Political Economy Perspective"
"Development, Growth and Population Ageing: A Political Economy Analysis" (with Been-Lon Chen & Minchung Hsu)