Do we receive a salary that is equal to our labor productivity? Classic labor economics assumes so, once labor demand equals labor supply. But imperfect competition, triggered, for example, by information assymetries and institutional factors, may clearly distort this relation. The paper recently published by Alexandre Gori Maia and Arthur Sakamoto (Texas A&M University) at the Brazilian Journal of Political Economy compares the relation between wages and labor productivity for different categories of workers in Brazil and in the United States. 

The paper "Does Wage Reflect Productivity? A Comparison Between Brazil and the United States" highlights to what extent the equilibrium between wages and productivity is related to the degree of economic development. Wages in the U.S. has shown to be more attached to labor productivity, while Brazil has experienced several economic cycles were average earnings grew initially much faster than labor productivity, suddenly falling down in the subsequent years. Analyses also stress how wage differentials, in fact, match productivity differentials for certain occupational groups, while for others they do not. The findings antecipated that the successive increases of the Brazilian average wages observed in the 2000's and 2010's would not be sustainable in the long run, since labor productivity remained with few changes.