Seminário de Pesquisa (EA) 12/08
Deixe um comentário / Economia Aplicada, Seminários de Pesquisa / Por Helena Camillo
Ocorrerá no dia 12/18/2026, quarta-feira, às 14h na sala 401A – FCE, o Seminário de Pesquisa “Minimum Wage and the Evolution of Racial Earnings Differences in Brazil between 1960 and 2025”, na área de Economia Aplicada, ministrado pelo Alysson Portela (FCE UFRGS).
Resumo:
Racial inequality can vary over time because the relative position of racial groups in the earnings distribution changes, or because race-neutral shifts in the distribution affect groups differently since they hold different positions in it. One key race-neutral policy shown to shape the earnings distribution is the minimum wage. In this paper, I extend the Bayer and Charles (2018, QJE) decomposition approach in a way that accounts for the role of the minimum wage in driving changes in racial differences due to shifts in the distribution. I then apply this framework to understand the forces behind the evolution of earnings differences between Black and White Brazilian men from 1960 to 2025. A race-neutral compression of the earnings distribution was the main factor reducing the gap at the median and the bottom quartile, while changes in the relative position of Black men played a key role in the convergence at the top of the distribution. The minimum wage’s effect on the racial gap is strongly bottom-concentrated and close to zero from the median up. Its erosion through the 1980s widened the bottom gap, while its recovery afterwards compressed it. However, because Black workers are the majority of those earning below the minimum wage, the same recovery widened the gap below the 10th percentile. On net, the rising minimum wage was a first-order factor behind the racial convergence in mean earnings over the period.