How is the minimum wage shaping the wage distribution: minimum wage, spillovers, and wage inequality in Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, Carlos Brito Mascarenhas de
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/142241
• topic: Wage inequality; Labour economics; Minimum wage; Spillovers; Wage distribution; Counterfactual dDecomposition; Distribution regression; Rank regression; Kernel density; Reweighting; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Over the last three decades, wage inequality and the importance of the minimum wage presented a nearly symmetric behavior in Portugal. Applying a semiparametric approach, this paper presents significant visual and quantitative evidence of how the MW structurally reshaped the wage distribution. The remarkable rise in the real MW of 2006-2019 explained virtually all of the decline in wage inequality, and 40% of the average wage growth, mostly driven by spillovers, which cascaded way above the minimum. The MW was most important for women, although spillovers were greater for men. Exploring the total-base wage differential also uncovered important new insights.