The gender gap, education, and the life cycle profile in the Brazilian formal labour market

Abstract

This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project on 'Inequality in the Giants'.

Decline In Wage Inequality In Brazil : A Survey

“…However, without causal models it is not possible to pin down the exact direction of this effect: was it the reduction in firms' heterogeneity that led to a decrease in racial wage gaps, or was it a reduction in discrimination that contributed partially to the compression of the firm-specific pay premium? Machado et al (2018) find that the gender earnings gap in Brazil is diminishing across generations, at least within the formal sector. If taste-based discrimination is also behind the observed gender gap, then the trade liberalization episode in the early 1990s may be also responsible for part of the reduction in the gender gap.…”

“…They decompose the overall gender gap into a within-and between-firm pay gap, finding that half of the differences is explained by each of these components. The importance of firms effects, together with occupation and industry effects, is also documented by Machado et al (2018), with a larger impact of these covariates on the gender gap among more educated workers. Again, given the recent decrease in firms fixed-effects documented by Alvarez et al (2018), it is not clear whether this was partially caused by a reduction in gender differences in payment or the reduction in the gender gap was the result of decreasing inequality in payment policies across firms.…”

What are the main drivers of Brazilian income distribution changes in the new millennium?

“…In the next section we apply a regression framework to analyse the gender gap specifically. We use these results here to discuss the broader determinants of inequality within education groups shown in Figure 8 (Alvarez et al 2017;Machado et al 2018). We mention here just the results for people who finished high school, but without a college education.…”

Earnings inequality in the Brazilian formal sector: The role of firms, education, and top incomes 1994–2015

“…Second, it is the only nationwide data source available with long spells of panel data. This longitudinal aspect allows studying the mobility of workers across sectors and individual firms as well as the life-cycle profile of these characteristics (Machado et al 2017). Third, RAIS also offers the possibility of analysing short-run employment and wage dynamics because it contains information on a monthly basis -used in Brazil -that allows aggregation to higher time-measurement periods -like a year used in most countries 1 .…”

“…RAIS (Registro Anual de Informações Sociais) is a matched employer-employee dataset at the Brazilian Labour Ministry that has gathered around 30 million observations on workers per year over the last two decades. RAIS depicts formal employment dynamics and wage differentials and is a powerful tool that may complement the evidence presented by other data sources (Alvarez et al 2017;Machado et al 2017).…”