Earlier work by Lustig and her coauthors found that a declining wage premium – that is, a drop in the wage gap between workers with high and low education – explained part of the decline in the Gini coefficient in Latin American countries. It is not easy to disentangle the role of supply and demand factors in the reduction of the wage premium, but both seem to have played a role.
最关键的是，税收和转移支付并不是遏制不平等性的唯一办法。卢斯蒂格及其合作者的早期研究发现，递减的工资溢价——即教育程度高低不同的工人工资差距缩小——可以部分解释拉美国家基尼系数的下降。厘清供求因素在工资溢价下降中的作用很困难，但这两个因素似乎都起着作用。