 Earnings Inequality and the Minimum Wage: Evidence from BrazilChristian Moser and
Niklas Engbom
No 72, 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Abstract: We assess the extent to which a rise in the minimum wage can account for three facts characterizing a large decline in earnings inequality in Brazil from 1996–2012: (i) the decline is more pronounced towards the bottom of the distribution; (ii) one quarter of the decline stems from an increase in relative pay at less productive firms; and (iii) another quarter is attributable to falling pay differences due to worker heterogeneity. To this end, we build an equilibrium search model with heterogeneity in worker ability and firm productivity. The central feature of the model is the presence of spillover effects of the minimum wage on higher earnings ranks due to monopsonistic competition among firms for workers. We estimate the model using indirect inference and find that the rise in the minimum wage explains 70 percent of the decline in the variance of log earnings. Spillover effects of the minimum wage account for more than half of this decline and quantitatively match the three empirical facts. Our results suggest that labor market dynamics can lead to large effects of policy on earnings inequality. Date: 2016 There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed016:72 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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