Schooling as a positional good: the Brazilian metropolitan regions in recent decades

In this article, I aim to determine whether, in view of the trend of educational expansion in recent decades in Brazil, the role played by schooling in the labor market of Brazilian major metropolitan regions has changed, becoming positional rather than absolute. To this end, I analyze the influence of schooling on people’s income and occupational status. Based on data from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD-IBGE) for years 1995, 2005 and 2015, I compare ordinary least squares models that use absolute and positional measures of schooling. The results show that the explanatory power is greater for positional measures than for absolute ones, and that this advantage has increased over recent decades. As a result, it is argued that although educational expansion possibly makes the chances of access to a certain absolute schooling level less unequal, it also ends up undermining the opportunity structure related to it.