Impacts of the Bolsa Família Program on the labor market of Brazilian municipalities

Abstract The Bolsa Família Program (PBF) benefits 14 million Brazilian families, and is one of the most important conditional cash transfer programs in Brazil in recent years. This articles investigates the impacts of the PBF in the formal labor market of the 5,570 Brazilian municipalities, from 2004 to 2013. The research used data from all Brazilian municipalities retrieved from the Cadastro Único (database of low-income families) of the Ministry of Social Development (MDS) and the Cadastro Central de Empresas (database of corporations) of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). The study adopted methods to estimate the ordinary least squares (OLS), and used panel data models as well as the dynamic models of Arellano and Bond (1991) in order to test hypotheses related to the association among the benefits from PBF, formal employment, and the total of salaries and other remunerations payed. The results indicate a positive association for the two hypotheses tested, in all three models applied.