In the last twenty years, Brazil has undergone several attempts of improving sustainable growth through stabilization programmes, and more recently, structural reforms in line with the Washington Consensus Agenda. The results, however, have been disappointing, as the per capita output growth has...

We assess the stability of the wage structure in an economy experiencing substantial economic changes. We find that the structure of inter-industry wage differentials remained remarkably stable in Brazil in the face of major shocks.

We investigate the impact of trade liberalization on wages and the returns to education in Brazil. Our pseudo-panel estimates of the returns are significantly lower than OLS estimates, signifying omitted ability bias in traditional cross-section estimated returns in developing countries. Trade...

The empirical literature on the impact of unions on wages has stressed two major conclusions. Firstly, unionised workers earn a wage premium when compared to comparable nonunionised workers. Secondly, the dispersion of wages within the union sector is lower than in the nonunion sector. We...

One of the established findings in the literature on inter-industry wage differentials is the long-term stability of the wage structure. In this paper, we examine how market-oriented and other economic reforms undertaken by an industrialising country affect the dispersion and structure of wages....

This paper investigates the impact of market-oriented economic reforms on union behaviour in Brazil. Previous work shows that openness, deregulation and similar measures constrain union power. In contrast, our results show that insider power has increased in the more competitive environment...