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Unequal Pay or Unequal employment? A Cross-Country Analysis of Gender Gaps

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Author Info
Claudia Olivetti
Barbara Petrongolo

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Abstract

There is evidence of a negative cross-country correlation between gender wage and employment gaps. We arguethat non-random selection of women into work explains an important part of such correlation and thus of theobserved variation in wage gaps. The idea is that, if women who are employed tend to have relatively high-wagecharacteristics, low female employment rates may become consistent with low gender wage gaps simplybecause low-wage women would not feature in the observed wage distribution. We explore this idea across theUS and EU countries estimating gender gaps in potential wages. We recover information on wages for those notin work in a given year using alternative imputation techniques. Imputation is based on (i) wage observationsfrom nearest available waves in the sample, (ii) observable characteristics of the nonemployed and (iii) astatistical repeated-sampling model. We then estimate median wage gaps on the resulting imputed wagedistributions, thus simply requiring assumptions on the position of the imputed wage observations with respectto the median, but not on their level. We obtain higher median wage gaps on imputed rather than actual wagedistributions for most countries in the sample. However, this difference is small in the US, the UK and mostcentral and northern EU countries, and becomes sizeable in Ireland, France and southern EU, all countries inwhich gender employment gaps are high. In particular, correction for employment selection explains more thana half of the observed correlation between wage and employment gaps.

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Paper provided by Centre for Economic Performance, LSE in its series CEP Discussion Papers with number dp0711.

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Date of creation: Dec 2005
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Handle: RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp0711

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Related research
Keywords: median gender gaps; sample selection; wage imputation;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:
E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution
J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials

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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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    Other versions:
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    Other versions:
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Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Black, Sandra E. & Spitz-Oener, Alexandra, 2007. "Explaining Women?s Success: Technological Change and the Skill Content of Women?s Work," ZEW Discussion Papers 07-033, ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Tomas Kögel, 2006. "An explanation of the positive correlation between fertility and female employment across Western European countries," Discussion Paper Series 2006_11, Department of Economics, Loughborough University. [Downloadable!]
  3. Natalie Chen & Paola Conconi & Carlo Perroni, 2007. "Women's Earning Power and the "Double Burden" of Market and Household Work," SOEPpapers 20, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  4. de la Rica, Sara & Dolado, Juan José & García-Peñalosa, Cecilia, 2008. "On Gender Gaps and Self-fulfilling Expectations: Theory, Policies and Some Empirical Evidence," IZA Discussion Papers 3553, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  5. Dragana Djurdjevic & Sergiy Radyakin, 2007. "Decomposition of the Gender Wage Gap Using Matching: An Application for Switzerland," Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES), Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics (SSES), vol. 143(IV), pages 365-396, December. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  6. Pedro Carneiro & Sokbae 'Simon' Lee, 2009. "Trends in quality-adjusted skill premia in the United States, 1960-2000," CeMMAP working papers CWP02/09, Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies. [Downloadable!]
  7. Tindara ADDABBO & Donata Favaro, 2007. "Education and wage differentials by gender in Italy," CHILD Working Papers wp04_07, CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics - ITALY. [Downloadable!]
  8. Chen, Natalie & Conconi, Paola & Perroni, Carlo, 2007. "Does Migration Empower Married Women?," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 812, University of Warwick, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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  9. Claudia Olivetti, . "Gender and the Labour Market: An International Perspective and the case of Italy," Boston University - Department of Economics - Working Papers Series wp2009-010, Boston University - Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  10. Luís Delfim Santos & José Varejão, 2006. "Employment, Pay and Discrimination in the Tourism Industry," FEP Working Papers 205, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto. [Downloadable!]
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