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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. Keywords: wage difference; intergovernmental transfers; municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect of increasing fiscal decentralization on the composition of public expenditures of Brazilian local governments. The research is innovative, demonstrating that the heterogeneity of expenditure scale influences the correlation between fiscal decentralization and public expenditure of local governments. The sample consisted of unbalanced panel data of 5,565 municipalities for 17 years from 2000 to 2016. The analysis used unconditional quantile regression with panel data. The main findings were: (i) fiscal decentralization affects public expenditure in Brazilian local governments. However, this effect depends on local expenditure scale and fiscal decentralization strategy. For example, the median coefficient was negative in personnel expenditures, and the effect was positive for the third quartile of local governments, when fiscal decentralization was measured by the tax revenue over total revenue. On the other hand, the effects were also positive for median and third quartile regarding intergovernmental transfers per capita like proxy of fiscal decentralization; (ii) the measures (proxies) of fiscal decentralization are correlated with the composition of public expenditure; (iii) in median terms, fiscal decentralization has greater effects on investment expenditures than on current and personnel expenditures; and (iv) in median terms, the tax revenue participation promotes an increase in administrative and planning expenditures instead of expenditures in social functions. Fiscal decentralization measured by intergovernmental transfer per capita has more positive effects on social functions than on legislative and administrative functions. Keywords: fiscal decentralization; public expenditures; municipalities; local governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]