This paper presents new empirical evidence about the wage gap between union and nonunion workers in Brazil. In principle, due to the rules governing union organization/mobilization, no one should rationally expect such gap. However, as this paper reveals, there is empirical evidence of its...

This study analyses the situation of the Brazilian population vis-à-vis the Social Security System (SSS) using data from PNAD. We chose the 1982, 1992 and 2002 PNAD data to give a series of pictures of the Brazilian population at equal intervals but under different legal instances with respect...

Time and locally specific poverty lines for Brazilian metropolitan areas, which concentrate a third of the country's population, are used for examining the proportion of poor along the short-term cycles, typical of the economic evolution in the 80's. Although the sensibility of poverty to the...

This paper aims at contributing to the debate regarding the role of the minimum wage in Brazil. This is carried out by assessing its potential effects on the labor market outcomes, as well in terms of poverty alleviation and fiscal impact. First, a succinct description of the institutional...

This paper investigates if the responsibility of the poverty level registered in Brazil is the poor operation of the labor market, in terms of underremuneration and underutilization of the labor factor. By means of a microsimulation based decomposition of distributional changes we assess the...

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...