Skill premium, labor supply, and changes in the structure of wages in Latin America

Manuel Fernandez Sierra and Julian Messina

Journal of Development Economics, 2018, vol. 135, issue C, 555-573

Abstract: After a decade of increasing wage inequality, this paper documents a sharp compression in the distribution of wages in Argentina and Chile during the 2000s. In Brazil, wage inequality has steadily declined since the early 1990s. Counterfactual exercises show that the evolutions of the schooling and experience premiums are key determinants of the decline in inequality. The 2000s witnessed a rapid decline in the schooling and experience premiums, at the same time as the working population was aging and becoming more educated. To understand these changes, the paper develops a model of imperfect substitution across experience and education groups and estimates the relevant elasticities of substitution. Changes in labor supply contributed significantly to the decline of the experience and education premiums, but are not enough to account fully for the observed changes. The demand for experience shifted in favor of younger workers, while the relative demand for college graduates declined during the 2000s.

Keywords: Earnings inequality; Unconditional quantile regressions; Supply-demand framework; Human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J20 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387818304905
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Skill Premium, Labor Supply and Changes in the Structure of Wages in Latin America (2017)
Working Paper: Skill Premium, Labor Supply and Changes in the Structure of Wages in Latin America (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:deveco:v:135:y:2018:i:c:p:555-573

DOI: 10.1016/j.jdeveco.2018.08.012

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Development Economics is currently edited by M. R. Rosenzweig

More articles in Journal of Development Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().