Skill prices and compositional effects on the declining wage inequality in Latin America: Evidence from Brazil

Abstract This paper studies potential explanations of the declining wage inequality in Brazil such as changes in demographic/skill composition, wage structure, occupations/sectors and minimum wage. I perform a wage inequality decomposition to quantify composition and price effects and use a CES production function to estimate the effects of the skill supply on relative wages. I find that the fall in upper-tail inequality is driven by changes in the returns to education and experience, while that in lower-tail inequality is also given by those to minimum wage and female workers. These patterns are consistent with the decline in relative wages between skill groups which are given by the increase in both the supply of skills and the real minimum wage.