This paper studies the labor market effects of an educational expansion on the occupational structure of employment and the wage distribution in Brazil. I document that, along with a large educational expansion between 1995 and 2014, the occupational structure of employment remained surprisingly fixed, with workers of all educational groups increasingly employed in lower wage occupations. Despite this common occupational downgrading, wages of primary educated workers soared while wages of workers with secondary school and university declined, bringing forth reductions in poverty and inequality. I then show that a relatively simple task-based model can trace all these heterogeneous patterns to the educational expansion. Specifically, I find that increases in education explain around 60% of the observed changes in occupations and wages. I also find that further educational expansions have marked diminishing returns due to more educated workers being increasingly employed in occupations where schooling adds little value to workers’ productivity.

本文研究了教育扩展对巴西就业的职业结构和工资分配的劳动力市场影响。我记录到，随着1995年至2014年之间的大规模教育扩张，就业的职业结构令人惊讶地固定下来，所有教育集团的工人越来越多地从事低薪职业。尽管这种普遍的职业降级，但受过良好教育的工人的工资却飙升，而具有中学和大学的工人的工资却下降了，从而减轻了贫困和不平等现象。然后，我证明了一个相对简单的基于任务的模型可以将所有这些异构模式追溯到教育扩展。具体而言，我发现教育的增长可以解释约60％的职业和工资变化。