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, 2025.
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 Peper #1: "Life Cycle Wage Growth in a Developing Economy: Employment Formality and Sector-Specific Human Capital Accumulation" (with Minchung hsu). GRIPS Discussion Paper No. 25-14. Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Development Economics.
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. Using rich longitudinal data from Chile, the Social Protection Survey (EPS) linked to administrative pension contribution records, we construct precise measures of formal and informal work experience and estimate their distinct contributions to wage dynamics. This dataset, the longest available panel for a developing country, allows for a detailed analysis of how sector-specific experiences influence life-cycle wage growth. 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. We also find that workers in formal jobs are far more likely to receive on-the-job training, helping to explain the divergence in human capital accumulation across sectors. Furthermore, the estimation framework provides a foundation for structural life-cycle models that incorporate sector-specific human capital accumulation and endogenous employment transitions between formal and informal sectors.
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.
Selected 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)