Do local civil servants capture intergovernmental transfers? The different wage determinants between the public and private sector

Abstract This article examines the intergovernmental transfer effects on wage differences between local civil servants and private sector employees. The sample was composed of 5,449 Brazilian municipalities, working with data from 2000 to 2016 clustered in 5,344 minimum comparable areas (MCA). The methodological procedures were quantitative and developed in two steps. The first step was to assess the median wage difference between local civil servants and private sector employees through unconditional quantile regression. The second was the analysis of different wage determinants through multiple regression with panel data, fixed effects, and additional estimations such as cluster-robust standard errors, temporal correlation, and spatial correlation. The results demonstrated that when per capita intergovernmental transfers increase by 1%, the wage difference between local civil servants and private sector employees increases by 0.067%. Besides that, when per capita GDP increases by 1%, the wage difference decreases by 0.036%. Furthermore, the paper observed that populational size increases and electoral competition decreases wage differences between the public and private sectors in Brazilian municipalities.