Job polarization and task prices in the Brazilian labor market

Vanessa N. Sulzbach, Guilherme Stein and Marcelo de C. Griebeler

Revista Brasileira de Economia - RBE, 2025, vol. 79, issue 2

Abstract: In most developed countries, technological change shifted the occupation structure towards cognitive and manual jobs. Jobs intensive in those two tasks saw an increase in both employment and earnings, to the detriment of routine intensive jobs. We provide evidence that this phenomenon also occurs in a large middle-income country, namely Brazil. We propose an alternative way to analyze wage polarization by estimating task prices using panel data at the individual level. We measure the occupation's task content using a continuous index instead of segregating them into broad exclusive groups. By measuring tasks content this way, we can preserve information on occupational task requirements, especially in occupations with a high level on more than one task. We show that when one uses task price, polarization emerges in earnings. Similar to what is found by the literature for other countries, technological change increased earnings – measured by task price – in manual and cognitive tasks, and decreased in routine ones, over the period studied.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://periodicos.fgv.br/rbe/article/view/93160 (text/html)

Related works:
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:fgv:epgrbe:v:79:y:2025:i:2:a:93160

Access Statistics for this article

Revista Brasileira de Economia - RBE is currently edited by Ricardo Cavalcanti

More articles in Revista Brasileira de Economia - RBE from EPGE Brazilian School of Economics and Finance - FGV EPGE (Brazil) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Núcleo de Computação da FGV EPGE ().