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The Austrian Pay Transparency Law and the Gender Wage Gap

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  • René Böheim
  • Sarah Gust

Abstract

In Austria, a gender pay transparency law was introduced in 2011, requiring companies with more than 1,000 employees to publish a pay report every other year. Firms with 500, 250, and 150 employees were subject to this requirement at later years. We estimate the impact of the law on men’s wages, women’s wages, and the gender pay gap using administrative data. The results from a regression discontinuity design suggest that the wage transparency law did not change wages or the gender wage gap. In larger firms, the wage of newly hired women increased more due to the reform than of newly hired men, suggesting that the gender wage gap decreased among newly hired workers. Our estimates of the effect of the law on employment growth or turnover are small, and statistically insignificant. For larger firms, we estimate that the transparency law led to a lower share of women in treated firms. These results are robust to several additional specifications.
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  • René Böheim & Sarah Gust, 2022. "The Austrian Pay Transparency Law and the Gender Wage Gap," CESifo Forum, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 23(02), pages 25-28, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ifofor:v:23:y:2022:i:02:p:25-28
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    Cited by:

    1. Jones, Melanie K. & Kaya, Ezgi, 2022. "Organisational Gender Pay Gaps in the UK: What Happened Post-transparency?," IZA Discussion Papers 15342, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Jones, Melanie K. & Kaya, Ezgi & Papps, Kerry L., 2022. "The Ongoing Impact of Gender Pay Gap Transparency Legislation," IZA Discussion Papers 15817, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Shang, Longfei & Saffar, Walid, 2024. "Pay transparency and entrepreneurship," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 162(C).
    4. Zoë B. Cullen & Bobak Pakzad‐Hurson, 2023. "Equilibrium Effects of Pay Transparency," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 91(3), pages 765-802, May.
    5. Chen, Yunsi & Hu, Dezhuang, 2023. "Why are exporters more gender-friendly? Evidence from China," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 118(C).
    6. Pham, Tho & Schaefer, Daniel & Singleton, Carl, 2024. "Unequal Hiring Wages and Their Impact on the Gender Pay Gap," IZA Discussion Papers 17285, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    7. Wolfgang Frimmel & Bernhard Schmidpeter & Rene Wiesinger & Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, 2022. "Mandatory Wage Posting, Bargaining and the Gender Wage Gap," Economics working papers 2022-02, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    8. Bamieh, Omar & Ziegler, Lennart, 2022. "Can Wage Transparency Alleviate Gender Sorting in the Labor Market?," IZA Discussion Papers 15363, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    9. Julien Picault, 2023. "A strategic approach to managerial compliance with equal pay policies," SN Business & Economics, Springer, vol. 3(8), pages 1-21, August.
    10. Bennedsen, Morten & Larsen, Birthe & Wei, Jiayi, 2022. "Wage Transparency and the Gender Pay Gap: A Survey," Working Papers 17-2022, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics.

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    JEL classification:

    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials

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