Gender Wage Gap: Some Recent Evidences from India

Gender wage inequality is a chronic socioeconomic malice in developed as well as in developing countries. This paper describes the outcomes of our study on the estimation of gender wage gap in the Indian labour market, using the 68th Round NSSO employment–unemployment data. The study uses Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition technique and Heckman two-step methodology, for removal of selectivity bias in the sample data, to measure the components of total gender wage gap, viz. (1) occupational segregation (explained by economic rationale) and (2) direct discrimination (not explained by economic rationale). The analysis indicates that the maximum direct discrimination is for job-related factors, such as industry type which are controlled by employers. The majority of the Indian employers today are men, which may be the reason for the insensitivity to the chronic direct discrimination against women in workplaces. The study also indicates that most of the explained gender wage gap is due to lower skill and experience amongst women. The findings suggest that besides labour law reforms for ensuring gender neutrality in workplaces, focused government policies for promoting women entrepreneurship and skill development of women are urgently required for reducing the gender wage gap in India.

     

Sex discrimination and competition in product and labour markets

Theoritical explanations for wage discrimination collapse in the long run, because competition should drive discriminations firms out of the market. In product markets with imperfect competition employes with a taste for discrimination might survive, None the less inthis case long-run efffects are also unclear, unless some monopsonistic power in the labour market is involved. Monopsony in the labour market, on the other hand, has received very little attention in the literature. The paper tries to pick up this long negleted issue, looking at the impact of concentration in output markets and local labour markets on wage discrimination by sex in Austria. As limited workers' mobility enables employers to define their own local labour markets,special attention is given to married women, whose geographical mobility is known to be very low.     

The impact of taxes on female labour supply

There is little agreement in economics on the factors influencing labour supply and hence on the impact of taxes. Within the marginal model, real wages and incomes are directing people's labour market behaviour independent of time and space, whereas the human resources approach takes account of the social environment and past behaviour. Even if strong assumptions are made, the neoclassical theory cannot predict the outcome of a wage increase. The labour supply response depends on the relative strengths of the substitution and the income effect. Since nonparticipation in the labour market is explained by a reservation wage being higher than the market wage, this is the only situation in which neoclassical theory would predict a rise in labour force participation with a wage increase. This case occured in a ‘natural experiment’ in Sweden. The Swedish tax system changed in 1971 from joint to separate taxation of spouses resulting in a substantial increase in the net wage of married women. This article investigates the impact of the change in the Swedish tax system on female labour force participation, concluding that it cannot explain the substantial rise in the participation rates of Swedish women. This is a significant result, questioning standard neoclassical theory and supporting the more institutional views of human labour market behaviour. That is that time and space as well as the social environment are important when analyzing labour supply. This will have consequences for international comparisons. Only factors which explain developments within one country might be relevant for explaining international differences, e.g. in labour force participation.     

A TEST OF EMPLOYER DISCRIMINATION IN THE NBA

This paper presents a test of an important implication of Becker's theory of employer discrimination: when institutional change enhances labor mobility, employer discrimination falls because it becomes more costly for employers to indulge tastes for discrimination. The test case is the National Basketball Association (NBA). This paper specifically addresses the following question about the NBA: why did black/white player salary differentials vanish by the early 1990s? Previous studies claim that NBA wage gaps in the 1980s are attributable to customer discrimination and monopsonistic wage discrimination. This study argues that employer discrimination was an important source of those gaps and that one reason they vanished was because reduced monopsony power eradicated employer discrimination. Monopsony power fell because the 1988 NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement and the entry of four new teams in the league enhanced player mobility and increased the amount of labor market competition. Using data for the 1985-86 and 1990-91 seasons, employer discrimination was proxied by the race of the team's general manager. Empirical results strongly suggest that a major reason the NBA wage gap vanished in the later period was because of a reduction in employers' ability to discriminate. This is in contrast to earlier literature on the NBA, which has tended to emphasize the role of customer discrimination. (JEL J71)     

Increased sorting and wage inequality in the Czech Republic

This paper makes use of a linked employer–employee dataset to examine the evolution of wage inequality in the Czech Republic during 1998–2006. We find evidence of slightly increasing returns to human capital and diminishing gender inequality and document sharp increases in both within‐firm and between‐firm inequality. We investigate several hypotheses to explain these patterns: increased domestic and international competition, decentralized wage bargaining, skill‐biased technological change and a changing educational composition of the workforce. Domestic competition is found to lower within‐firm inequality whereas we find no evidence that increased international trade at the industry level is associated with higher between‐ or within‐firm wage inequality. The key factors driving the observed increase in wage inequality are increased educational sorting and the inflow of foreign firms to the Czech Republic.     

中美制造业双边贸易对美国相对工资差距的影响研究*

在新古典贸易理论一般均衡的框架之下,运用1997-2014年中美两国的投入产出、贸易和工资数据,本文定量考察了中美制造业产品的双边贸易同美国制造业相对工资差距的关系。结果发现,美国从中国的净进口对美国制造业非熟练劳动力和熟练劳动力相对工资差距扩大存在影响,但影响幅度较小,贸易并不是引起相对收入差距扩大的唯一原因。但随着中美双边制造业贸易的进一步发展,美中贸易对美国工资差距的影响可能越来越大,以保护非熟练劳动力为名对中国产品实施贸易限制的呼声将会更高。     

Revisiting the Relevance of International Trade Theory

Probably one of the most controversial contributions to the literature of international trade theory was offered by the late social economist John Culbertson. In his view, low wage competition among corporations in a world characterized by capital mobility and massive trade deficits undermines the foundation trade theory based on David Ricardo’s celebrated notion of comparative advantage. Instead, there are several good reasons to believe that international trade with China, India, Vietnam, etc. will be governed by absolute advantage. The current essay is dedicated to the virtually ignored work of Culbertson, and it is meant as an invitation for social economists to critically evaluate the argument and in the process make an attempt to point out where it goes wrong.     

Foreign trade and innovation in domestic labor relations

For the most part, neoclassical trade theory has restricted its concerns to the effect that trade has on the production and distribution of commodities. It implicitly assumes that international trade leaves unchanged the institutional structure of domestic economies.The empirical evidence presented here supports the claim that international trade induces innovation in the institutions regulating the capital-labor relationship. Existing trade theories, neoclassical or otherwise, that assume away such changes give only a partial answer to one of the central questions a theory of trade must answer: What are the effects of trade, and are these effects beneficial?     

ENDOGENOUS MARKET STRUCTURES AND STRATEGIC TRADE POLICY*

I characterize the optimal export promoting policy for international markets whose structure is endogenous. Contrary to the ambiguous results of strategic trade policy for duopolies, it is always optimal to subsidize exports when entry is endogenous, under both quantity and price competition. With homogenous goods the optimal export subsidy is a fraction 1/ε of the price, where ε is the elasticity of demand (the exact opposite of the optimal export tax in the neoclassical trade theory). Analogously, I show the general optimality of R&D subsidies and of competitive devaluations to promote exports in foreign markets where entry is endogenous.     

Statistical Discrimination and Gender Wage Gap: A Model

In this paper, I extend the model in Coate and Loury (CL) (1993) to show how statistical discrimination by employers can help create gender wage gap for men and women with equal earning potentials. Given that employers do not perfectly observe a worker’s skill type and partly rely on the average skills level of his (her) peers for inference purpose, employers’ differential treatment of male and female workers can create different skill-investment incentives for them, which in turn justify employers’ discrimination in the first place. The second result of this paper which is not possible within the original CL framework is that I point to the possibility that there exist circumstances under which the gender wage gap can not be eliminated without the formerly advantaged sex being negatively affected.     

The Exchange Rate and Inflation in Argentina: A Classical Critique of Orthodox and Heterodox Policy Prescriptions

In this paper we present an alternative framework to neoclassical theory of international trade and exchange rate determination. Our model, inspired in the classical tradition, provides support for the assertion that an exchange rate policy aiming to improve national competitiveness and to bring about a sustained trade surplus is a viable option. In fact, the success of this strategy does not depend on the effectiveness of monetary sterilization —as many argentinean heterodox authors claim— but on the ability to overcome the boundaries imposed by the evolution of the domestic wage rate and the potential emergence of competitive devaluations. In the particular case of Argentina, the introduction of export taxes on land-intensive commodities, in which the economy has absolute advantages, brings an additional policy tool that can make both the exchange rate target and the workers claims consistent.     

国际贸易的内生化新体系:新兴古典贸易理论

新兴古典经济学派从消费者与生产者的统一出发,构建了贸易产生的内生化新体系。该体系拓展了国际贸易的新理论建构,以专业化与分工为基础,引进外生交易费用、内生交易费用、市场组织与层系等参数,可使得国际贸易在经济中的产生内生化,并由此形式化贸易的发展历程,为国内贸易与国际贸易建立统一的基础,克服以新古典经济学为框架的传统国际贸易理论中国际贸易与国内贸易具有不同基础的理论困难,提供了国际贸易理论的全新思路,对21世纪全球市场的形成与发展具有重要的启示意义。     

GENDER DISCRIMINATION ESTIMATION IN A SEARCH MODEL WITH MATCHING AND BARGAINING*

This article develops a search model of the labor market with matching, bargaining, and employers' taste discrimination in which—under necessary but standard distributional assumption—it is possible to separately identify gender discrimination and unobserved productivity differences. The equilibrium shows that both prejudiced and unprejudiced employers wage discriminate. Maximum likelihood estimates on CPS data indicate that half of the employers are prejudiced, average female productivity is 6.5% lower, and two‐third of the gender earning differential may be explained by prejudice. An affirmative action policy is implemented resulting in a redistribution of welfare from men to women at no cost for employers' welfare.     

The Exchange Rate and Inflation in Argentina: A Classical Critique of Orthodox and Heterodox Policy Prescriptions

In this paper we present an alternative framework to neoclassical theory of international trade and exchange rate determination. Our model, inspired in the classical tradition, provides support for the assertion that an exchange rate policy aiming to improve national competitiveness and to bring about a sustained trade surplus is a viable option. In fact, the success of this strategy does not depend on the effectiveness of monetary sterilization —as many argentinean heterodox authors claim— but on the ability to overcome the boundaries imposed by the evolution of the domestic wage rate and the potential emergence of competitive devaluations. In the particular case of Argentina, the introduction of export taxes on land-intensive commodities, in which the economy has absolute advantages, brings an additional policy tool that can make both the exchange rate target and the workers claims consistent.     

International Trade and Inter‐Industry Wage Structure in Swedish Manufacturing: Evidence from Matched Employer–Employee Data*

This study examines the inter‐industry wage structure in Swedish manufacturing, using matched employer–employee data for the period 1996 to 2000. First, we used detailed individual and job characteristics to estimate industry‐specific and time‐varying wage premiums. Secondly, we investigated the impact of international trade on wage premiums, controlling for effects of domestic competition and technical progress. Our results suggest that industries that face intensive import competition from low‐income countries have lower wage premiums. Surprisingly, the wage premiums are not related to export intensities. Furthermore, technical progress, measured by investment in R&D activity, appears to enhance inter‐industry wage premiums.     

Discrimination and the unemployment durations of white and black males

In this study we develop a model to decompose the longer unemployment duration of blacks into discriminatory and non-discriminatory components. By extending Becker's theory of discrimination to job-search theory, the discriminatory component is seen to be the result of two separate effects. First, a white treatment advantage shortens the unemployment duration of whites because they receive more frequent and higher wage offers than would prevail in the absence of discrimination for working alongside blacks. Second, a black treatment disadvantage lengthens the jobless spell of blacks because blacks receive lower wage offers than would prevail without discrimination as discriminating employers extract quasi-rents from their labour. We estimate our model using date from the CPS Displaced Workers Survey. The results show that 3.81 of the 4.58 weeks longer unemployment spell for blacks is due to discrimination, with 3.11 weeks resulting from the white treatment advantage, and 0.7 weeks emanating from the black treatment disadvantage.     

A social clause against discrimination in the labor market

This paper considers the possibility of employing a social clause on international trade to reduce occupational discrimination and wage discrimination in the labor market. A country subject to such a clause is given the choice of reducing discrimination or having to face the imposition of a tariff or quota on its exports. The impact of these two changes on the remunerations of different groups in society is analyzed in a model allowing for a labor surplus. The analysis shows that neither in the case of occupational discrimination nor in the case of wage discrimination is the social clause necessarily an efficient means for reducing discrimination. Very much depends on how different groups are affected, on the relative political weight of these groups, and on the share of exports in total output.     

Impact of international trade under dual labor markets

A country's unemployment rate can be affected by technology choice and the opening of international trade. This general equilibrium model examines the impact of international trade with the presence of dual labor markets in which manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose technologies with different marginal and fixed costs to maximize profits. In a closed economy, it is shown that an increase in labor market efficiency or a population increase induces manufacturing firms to adopt more advanced technologies and the wage rate in the manufacturing sector increases. With the existence of a continuum of technologies, technology choice is not a source of firm heterogeneity. The opening of international trade leads to an increase in the wage rate in the manufacturing sector and the price of the agricultural good. When countries are identical, international trade always increases national welfare.     

THE GENDER PAY GAP UNDER DUOPSONY: JOAN ROBINSON MEETS HAROLD HOTELLING

This paper presents an alternative explanation of the gender pay gap resting on a simple Hotelling-style duopsony model of the labour market. Since there are only two employers, equally productive women and men have to commute and face travel cost to do so. We assume that some women have higher travel cost, e.g., due to more domestic responsibilities. Employers exploit that women on average are less inclined to commute and offer lower wages to all women. Since women's firm-level labour supply is for this reason less wage-elastic, this model is in line with Robinson's explanation of wage discrimination.     

Another Nail in the Coffin? Or Can the Trade Based Explanation of Changing Skill Structures Be Resurrected?

The skill structure of wages and employment has altered markedly in recent years. In some countries (most notably the UK and the US) wage inequality has risen sharply and in most countries relative demand has shifted unfavourably against the less skilled. In this paper we reassess the evidence that rising international competition from developing countries is the crucial factor underpinning these changes. Our results, based on newly constructed internationally comparable industry data, find little support for the predictions of the basic Heckscher-Ohlin (H-O) trade model.
JEL classification: J 31; F 14