Abstract:
In this paper we examine the wage of all workers of single plant in the State of São Paulo over the time, using the data of RAIS (Annual Records of Social Information). The objective is to test different theories of wages inside a firm. The results show that the workers have a certain degree of protection against changes in external market conditions, that wage policy of the plant is strongly guided by observable employees' characteristics and that the wage increases inside the plant have a small and negative serial correlation. Above of all, we find that none of the three main theories of wage determination alone can explain the results.