The literature on wage gaps in Brazil consistently indicate a premium to the public sector when compared to the private sector. The purpose of this paper is complement the analysis presented in the literature with relevant information about other parts of the conditional distribution of wages. The characterization of the conditional distribution is obtained through the quantile regression methods. The results obtained reveal the public sector premium is larger in the lower tail of the wage distribution, declining steadily as we move towards the upper tail. The public sector advantage is reversed only in specific instances.
