Wages in a growing Russia

The robust Russian economic recovery after the 1998 financial crisis raised the economic standing of the population, especially for lowly paid workers, most of whom are women. In this paper I use the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey from 1996 through 2002 to ask whether this helped to reduce the gender wage gap. I first focus on those whose wages are paid in full. Next, I ask about the gender composition of wage arrears as the overall extent of wage arrears dropped from 60 to 20 per cent after the 1998 crisis. I show that a temporary widening of the overall gender wage gap in 2000 is due to low‐wage women becoming more likely to receive their wages in full than low‐wage men. Except for this effect, the male–female pay difference in Russia exhibits a stable pattern.     

Wage differentials by sector and gender: a quantile analysis for the Spanish case

This paper analyses existing wage differentials between workers in the public and private sectors and by gender in Spain. This analysis is run throughout the entire earnings distribution and observed wage differentials are decomposed into a part explained by differences in productive characteristics and a part due to differences in returns to such characteristics. Our results show that public sector workers tend to earn higher wages than private employees, although most of this sector wage gap is due to better public workers’ productive characteristics. A wage premium in favour of men is also found in both the public and private sectors, with the gender wage gap greater at the top of the earnings distribution.     

Can Minimum Wages Close the Gender Wage Gap?

Using manufacturing plant‐level census data, this paper demonstrates that minimum wage increases in Indonesia reduced gender wage gaps among production workers, with heterogeneous impacts by level of education and position of the firm in the wage distribution. Paradoxically, educated women appear to have benefitted the most, particularly in the lower half of the firm average earnings distribution. By contrast, women who did not complete primary education did not benefit on average, and even lost ground in the upper end of the earnings distribution. Minimum wage increases were thus associated with exacerbated gender pay gaps among the least educated, and reduced gender gaps among the best educated production workers. Unconditional quantile regression analysis attests to wage compression and lighthouse effects. Changes in relative employment prospects were limited.     

贸易开放与性别工资差距

本文在不完全竞争市场环境下,建立贸易开放和性别工资差距的数理模型。在理论分析的基础之上,本文运用2002年中国家庭住户收入项目调查数据(CHIP)进行实证分析。在控制了年龄、婚姻状况和受教育年限等个体层面和人均GDP等城市层面的工资影响因素情形下,得出结论:贸易开放在总体上拉大了性别工资差距;贸易开放缩小了高技能劳动力的性别工资差距,拉大了低技能劳动力的性别工资差距。从某种意义上说,女性弱势群体更容易被排除在贸易开放的利益之外。因此,提高女性的受教育程度,并为之提供相应的制度保障具有尤为重要的政策含义。     

市场歧视对城镇地区性别工资差距的影响

本文使用基于分位数回归的反事实分析方法研究了中国城镇地区的性别工资差距问题,发现了以下三个结论:第一,性别工资差距在工资分布不同位置上存在不对称现象。从横截面数据来看,在工资分布顶端性别工资差距较小,在工资分布末端性别工资差距较大。从时序数据来看,在工资分布顶端性别工资差距越来越小,在工资分布末端性别工资差距越来越大。第二,性别工资差距在横截面数据上表现出不对称现象的原因是,女性在工资分布顶端受到的歧视程度低,在末端受到的歧视程度高。第三,性别工资差距在工资分布末端越来越大的原因是,女性受到的歧视程度越来越高;在工资分布顶端越来越小的原因是,男性和女性个人特征方面(如受教育水平)的差别越来越小。     

Minimum Wages and the Gender GAP in Pay: New Evidence from the United Kingdom and Ireland

Women are disproportionately in low‐paid work compared to men so, in the absence of rationing effects on their employment, they should benefit the most from minimum wage policies. This study examines the change in the gender wage gap around the introduction of minimum wages in Ireland and the United Kingdom (U.K.). Using survey data for the two countries, we develop a decomposition of the change in the gender differences in wage distributions around the date of introduction of minimum wages. We separate out “price” effects attributed to minimum wages from “employment composition” effects. A significant reduction of the gender gap at low wages is observed after the introduction of the minimum wage in Ireland, while there is hardly any change in the U.K. Counterfactual simulations show that the difference between countries may be attributed to gender differences in non‐compliance with the minimum wage legislation in the U.K.     

Gender wage differentials by education in Italy

In this article we evaluate wage differentials in Italy combining gender and education perspectives. The main goal of this article is to verify whether the extent of the gender pay gap varies between highly- and low-educated workers, and whether or not the role played by gender differences in characteristics and in market rewards is similar in the two groups. We apply quantile regression analysis and an adaptation of the procedure suggested by Machado and Mata (2005) to evaluate the predicted wage gap at different points of the female wage distribution scale. The analysis is carried out on the Italian sample of the last available year of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). We show that the extent and the trend of the gap predicted across the female distribution is sharply different between groups with diverse educational levels. In the case of low-educated workers, although the predicted gap is largely explained by differences in rewards, lower levels of education or experience are responsible for the gap, especially on the right-hand side of the distribution. On the contrary, highly-educated females have better characteristics than highly-educated men that partially compensate the rather high difference in returns, in particular at the extremes of the distribution.     

Temporary and Permanent Immigration under Unionization

This paper investigates permanent and temporary immigration and remittance under the coexistence of unionized and non‐unionized manufacturing firms in a two‐sector economy. The impacts of immigration and remittance on respectively wages, employment, the union–non‐union wage gap and national welfare are analyzed. It is found that both permanent immigration (economy‐wide) and temporary immigration in agriculture bring positive effects on most variables (except the competitive wage), but widens the wage gap and causes income redistribution in the host country. However, if temporary immigrants work in manufacturing only, then all wages and the union–non‐union wage gap fall. That is, workers become more equally paid but poorer. In addition, remittance and globalization cause negative effects on union workers and employers. It is perhaps such consequences and the income redistribution effect of immigration that cause the media to paint a negative image of immigration.     

Is There a Glass Ceiling over Germany?

This paper analyzes the gender wage gap across the wage distribution using 2010 data from the German Statistical Agency. I investigate East and West Germany and the public sector separately to account for potential heterogeneities in wage gaps. I apply unconditional and conditional quantile regression methods to investigate the differences between highly paid men and women in distributions conditional and unconditional on covariates. The results indicate increasing gender wage gaps in all estimations, suggesting that there is indeed a glass ceiling over Germany even after controlling for a large set of observable characteristics (including occupation and industry). This finding is even more pronounced when also taking bonus payments into account.     

Labour market institutions,crisis and gender earnings gap in Eastern Europe

We study gender pay inequality in ten Central and Eastern EU countries before (2007) and during the economic crisis (2009) using quantile regression methods. The analysis reveals remarkable cross‐country diversity in levels and patterns of the gender gap along the earnings distribution; for the majority of the countries the crisis is associated with declining male/female disparities. We address the role played by labour market institutions in shaping the observed gender pay gap levels and patterns. Labour market deregulation increases gender inequality at the middle and at the top of the pay distribution, but reduces disparities at the bottom. Higher union density and wage coordination reduce the pay gap, with stronger equalizing effects on better‐paid jobs. The crisis seems to weaken the already poor role of institutions in the low‐pay sector.     

Are children driving the gender wage gap?

We examine how much children and the responsibilities related to them contribute to the divergence of men's and women's wages, and consequently, to the formation of the gender wage gap. To derive the relative contribution of gender‐specific parent gaps to the overall gender wage gap, we provide a modification of the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition and include simultaneous corrections for selection into employment and parenthood. The results show that the fatherhood wage premium contributes most significantly to the gender wage gap, especially in Poland. The motherhood penalty is also significant, while the role of the gender gap among childless individuals is small.     

The gender wage gap among recent post‐secondary graduates in Canada: a distributional approach

Using the National Graduates Survey, we examine the trends in the gender wage gap among recent post‐secondary graduates in Canada between 1988 and 2007. Female graduates earn on average 6–14% less than males during the period two to five years after graduation. Decompositions show that observable personal characteristics and job attributes can explain only a small portion of the wage gap. We also find that men earn more than women at every point of the distribution. Interestingly, the wage difference shrank in the lower half of the distribution in recent years, while it increased in the upper half.     

Sex Differentials in Earnings in the South Korean Labor Market

We examine gender differences in earnings among South Korean workers in 1988 – the year the South Korean National Assembly enacted the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Using the "88 Occupational Wage Bargaining Survey on the Actual Condition," we calculate women's mean earnings as a percentage of men's mean earnings by major industrial category and educational attainment. We find a larger wage gap among clerical and sales workers than production workers or professionals. Generally, the more education a woman has, the smaller the gap between her earnings and those of her male counterparts. Women with a middle-school education have a mean income 53.5 percent that of comparable men, while the female-to-male wage ratio among college graduates is 76.1 percent. We analyze wage differences separately for women and men. Following Ronald Oaxaca's (1973) work, we decompose male–female wage differentials. We also calculate a discrimination coefficient. Our work shows that, all else equal, men earn from 33.6 percent to 46.9 percent more than women with comparable skills. We attribute the difference to gender discrimination.     

Male–female wage discrimination in Chinese industryInvestigation using firm‐level data1

We use firm‐level data to analyze male–female wage discrimination in China's industry. We find that there is a significant negative association between wages and the share of female workers in a firm's labour force. However, we also find that the marginal productivity of female workers is significantly lower than that of male workers. Comparing wage gaps and productivity gaps between men and women, we notice an intriguing contrast between state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms. The wage gap is smaller than the productivity gap in SOEs, while the converse is true for private firms. These results suggest that women in the state sector receive wage premiums, whereas women in the private sector face wage discrimination.     

A quantitative theory of the gender gap in wages

This paper measures how much of the gender wage gap over the life cycle is due to the fact that working hours are lower for women than for men. We build a quantitative theory of fertility, labor supply, and human capital accumulation decisions to measure gender differences in human capital investments over the life cycle. We assume that there are no gender differences in the human capital technology and calibrate this technology using wage–age profiles of men. The calibration of females assumes that children involves a forced reduction in hours of work that falls on females rather than on males and that there is an exogenous gender gap in hours of work. We find that our theory accounts for all of the increase in the gender wage gap over the life cycle in the NLSY79 data. The impact of children on the labor supply of females accounts for 56% and 45% of the increase in the gender wage gap over the life cycle among non-college and college females, while the rest is due to the exogenous gender differences in hours of work.     

Gender wage gap across the wage distribution in different segments of the Indian labour market, 1983–2012: exploring the glass ceiling or sticky floor phenomenon

Women’s participation in the Indian labour market is not only low but they are also engaged in low-productivity and low-paying jobs. Further, the labour market is segmented by gender, type of employment, sector and location of residence. This study makes an important contribution by examining gender wage gap in India across different segments of the labour market over the wage distribution using national-level representative data spanning the period 1983 to 2012. The empirical results suggest that (i) the male–female raw wage gap has declined over time across the wage distribution, (ii) the gender wage gap attributable to differing returns to characteristics has increased over time and there is evidence of convergence of productive characteristics of men and women, (iii) sticky floor rather than glass ceiling phenomenon is observed in all segments of the labour market and (iv) the adjusted wage gap suggests that women at the bottom of the distribution face higher discrimination than those at the top and this has increased over the years.     

Assessing the Possible Antipoverty Effects of Recent Rises in Age‐Specific Minimum Wages in New Zealand

Real minimum wages increased by nearly 33 percent for adults and 123 percent for teenagers in New Zealand between 1999 and 2008. Where fewer than 2 percent of workers were being paid a minimum wage at the outset of this sample period, more than 8 percent of adult workers and 60 percent of teenage workers were receiving hourly earnings close to the minimum wage by the end of this period. These policy changes provide a unique opportunity to estimate the effects of the minimum wage on poverty. Although minimum wage workers are more likely to live in the poorest households, they are relatively widely dispersed throughout the income distribution. This is particularly true of teenage minimum wage workers. Furthermore, low‐income households often do not contain any working members. We estimate that a 10 percent increase in minimum wages, even without a loss in employment or hours of work, would lower the relative poverty rate by less than one‐tenth of a percentage point.     

When does transition increase the gender wage gap?

In the context of underlying stability in female participation rates, the gender wagegap, measured by the log of monthly wages, more than doubled in Belarus from 1996 to 2006. In this respect, the country has experienced a variant of the transition which occurred in the former Soviet Union where relative female wages fell by more than female participation. We have used the Machado and Mata (2005) analysis of the gender gap distribution. This reveals that the effect of coefficients on observed characteristics in widening the gap was increasing over time, especially in the lower and middle deciles of the wage distribution. At the same time, the effect of the characteristics themselves in reducing the gap was shrinking. The decomposition of changes in the gap over time, based on Juhn et al. (1991) , confirms that the contraction of women’s relative wages has been caused both by a deterioration in the observed characteristics of female workers and by the associated remuneration. Changes in the residual wage distribution tend to slightly reduce the gap rather than, as is the case elsewhere, to increase it. The analysis carried out in line with Neuman and Oaxaca (2004) suggests that the increased gap was not caused by sample selection. Instead, two observed factors are found to be mainly responsible for the results: hours of work have increased for men more than for women and women have experienced segregation in low‐wage industries.     

Decomposing Gender Wage Differentials Using Quantile Regression: Evidence from the Lebanese Banking Sector

This paper investigates gender pay inequality in the labor market of a developing country. Our empirical investigation uses data derived from a sample of employees in the Lebanese banking sector for the years 2008 and 2014. Using Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, the results reveal that the unexplained component of the gender wage gap, attributed to discrimination, represents a substantial share of the total gap. A surprising result is that the contribution of human capital to the gender wage gap is negative, suggesting that wage discrimination is the main explanation for the gap. Utilizing the Machado-Mata methodology to decompose the wage gap across the entire wage distribution, our findings indicate that the unexplained component of the raw gender wage gap is more pronounced at the low and middle ranges of the distribution. However, the explained component dominates at the top of the distribution, suggesting that earnings gaps are fully explained by observed characteristics.