Extreme inequality in Brazil is self-evident. The historian José Murilo de Carvalho emblematically chose to end his book on the history of citizenship in Brazil with the severe diagnosis that 'inequality is the slavery of today, the new cancer that hinders the constitution of a democratic...

We present the preliminary results of our analysis of top incomes in Brazil from 2006 to 2012. We describe the evolution of the income shares of the top 1% and the top 5% and estimate a "corrected" Gini coefficient. The data used comes from personal income tax returns, national accounts and...

Using a factor decomposition of the Gini coefficient we measure the contribution to inequality of direct monetary income flows to and from the Brazilian State. The income flows from the State include public servants' earnings, Social Security pensions, unemployment benefits and Social Assistance...

Using retrospective simulations, we examine whether educational expansions in the past could have reduced earnings inequality and income poverty in Brazil. We use data from three censuses and 35 national household surveys (PNAD). The simulations indicate that there are important limitations to...