MINIMUM WAGE HIKES AND THE WAGE GROWTH OF LOW‐WAGE WORKERS

This paper presents difference‐in‐differences estimates of the impact of the British minimum wage on the wage growth of low‐wage employees. Estimates of the probability of low‐wage employees receiving positive wage growth have been significantly increased by the minimum wage upratings or hikes. However, whether the actual wage growth of these workers has been significantly raised or not depends crucially on the magnitude of the minimum wage hike considered. Findings are consistent with employers complying with the legally binding minimum wage but holding down or offsetting the wage growth that they might have awarded in periods of relatively low minimum wage hikes.     

WAGE DIFFERENTIALS, DISCRIMINATION AND INEQUALITY: A CAUTIONARY NOTE ON THE JUHN, MURPHY AND PIERCE DECOMPOSITION METHOD

This paper shows how difficult it is to study the roles of discrimination and unobserved skills when studying changes in racial and gender wage gaps over time by examining merits and shortcomings of a popular decomposition method by Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (JMP). The JMP method shows that wage dispersion can offer a compelling explanation of the wage gap. However, JMP have to rely on a few strong assumptions in order to derive their decomposition equation, which introduces wage inequality as the price of unobserved skills (the standard deviation of the residuals) into their decomposition equation.     

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.     

Personality and the gender wage gap

In this study, we investigate whether personality traits contribute towards a better understanding of the reasons for the gender wage gap. We explore whether two of the personality factors put forward by Bowles et al. (2001) as likely to be incentive enhancing in the employer–employee relationship can explain the difference in wages for women and men. These are (1) personal self efficacy (Locus of Control (LoC)) and (2) time preference. We also study the role of the so called Big Five personality traits (extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, openness intellect and conscientiousness), which have been associated with earnings in several recent studies. Using a sample of Dutch employees, we found that 11.5% of the observed gender wage gap could be ascribed to differences in the personality trait scores (mainly in agreeableness and intellect), while less than 0.5% could be ascribed to gender differences in the returns to the traits. The addition of personality traits to a traditional human capital model reduces the unexplained part of the gender wage gap from 75.2% to 62.7%. We therefore conclude that these traits represent a valuable addition to the model.     

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.     

The Gender Wage Gap in Offered,Observed, and Reservation Wages for Spain

The literature on the gender wage gap and wage discrimination has exclusively analyzed observed wage differences, ignoring inactive or unemployed individuals. In order to obtain a more complete overview of gender wage differences, this paper analyzed inactive or unemployed individuals in terms of offered and reservation wages in Spain in the years 1994, 2000, and 2006. The results show that the observed wages give a more positive perspective of the gender wage gap than offered ones. Furthermore, the existence of an important gender wage gap for reservation wages has been noted, which is possibly because women take charge of household and family caregiving tasks to a greater degree than men. The results show that Spanish women had higher reservation wages and lower offered wages than men, which explains their lower participation in the labor market.     

Swimming with the Tide: Solidary Wage Policy and the Gender Earnings Gap

This paper addresses the consequences of wage compression for the gender wage gap in Sweden during the period 1968–1991. We find that the effects of changes in the wage structure on women's wages have varied over time and have been partly counteracting. Changes in industry wage differentials have systematically worked against women, while changes in the returns to human capital and unobserved characteristics have contributed to reductions in the gender wage gap. Changes in the wage structure were particularly important between 1968 and 1974 when there was a dramatic reduction in overall wage inequality.
JEL classification : J 16; J 31; J 51     

Equal Pay for Equal Work? Evidence from Sweden and a Comparison with Norway and the U.S.

Using a new data set covering most privately employed workers in Sweden, we compare gender wage differences to those previously reported for Norway and the U.S. The central finding is that the wage gap is small when comparing men and women working in the same type of occupation for the same employer. Segregation of men and women by occupation accounts for more of the gap in Sweden than in the other two countries. In all three countries, we find that segregation by occupation explains more than segregation by establishment, and that institutional changes over the past two decades aimed at improving the status of women had little effect on the gender wage gap.
JEL classification : J 16; J 71     

工资问题的研究新进展

本文分4个维度梳理了近年来国外学者对工资问题的新研究进展:一是工资上涨的产业竞争力后果;二是工资结构的演进趋势及绩效后果;三是工资的决定因素;四是工资压力的应对措施。在今天中国工资上涨的特殊背景下,梳理上述研究成果可以为相关政策的制定提供参考。     

中国制造业贸易模式变迁的工资差距效应

本文利用中国制造业27个细分行业的面板数据,采用固定效应不变系数的静态面板模型,考察了我国制造业从产业间贸易向产业内贸易的变迁对行业间工资差距的影响及其传导机制。研究结果表明：（1）在制造业贸易模式的变迁中,出口扩大了行业间工资差距,而进口缩小了行业间工资差距。（2）制造业贸易模式变迁主要通过价格机制扩大了行业间的工资差距,而技术机制和个体机制的影响则不显著。     

产业内贸易对中国技能 工资差距的影响

本文试图考察产业内贸易对技能工资差距的影响,理论分析表明：它随劳动力条件的变化而变化,在劳动力无限供给条件下它取决于技术劳动力的绝对需求,由于产业内贸易必能刺激技术劳动力的绝对需求,因此必然会扩大工资差距。但在劳动力条件转向有限供给后,它又取决于技术劳动力的相对需求,而产业内贸易未必使之扩大,特别是对两类劳动力替代弹性较大的部门来说,可能会使技术劳动力的相对需求下降,并使技能工资差距收缩。本文基于中国33个产业的5年面板数据验证了上述假说。     

"Holding hands at midnight": The paradox of caring labor

Abstract

The gender wage gap in the United States narrowed considerably throughout the 1980s and then more slowly in the 1990s. Using a decomposition methodology and US Current Population Survey data, this study investigates the impact of deindustrialization's continuing shift in employment away from manufacturing to services on the US gender wage gap between 1990 and 2001. The study finds that the widening of the gender wage gap in the service sector caused a slowdown in the narrowing of the US gender wage gap. Within the service sector, two occupational elements affected the growing gender wage gap: women's entry into traditionally male occupations characterized by high wages and high gender wage differentials that resulted in the relative increase in men's wages compared to women's wages in these occupations.     

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.     

Glass Ceiling or Sticky Floor? Exploring the Australian Gender Pay Gap

Using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, this paper analyses the gender wage gaps across the wage distribution in both the public and private sectors in Australia. Quantile regression techniques are used to control for various characteristics at different points of the wage distributions. Counterfactual decomposition analysis, adjusted for the quantile regression framework, is used to examine if the gap is attributed to gender differences in characteristics, or to the differing returns between genders. The main finding is that a strong glass ceiling effect is detected only in the private sector. A second finding is that the acceleration in the gender gap across the distribution does not vanish even after account is taken of an extensive set of statistical controls. This suggests that the observed wage gap is a result of differences in returns to genders. By focusing only on the mean gender wage gap, substantial variations of the gap will be hidden.     

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.     

The unequal distribution of unequal pay – An empirical analysis of the gender wage gap in Switzerland

In this paper we analyze the distribution of the gender wage gap. Using microdata for Switzerland we estimate conditional wage distribution functions and find that the total wage gap and its discrimination component are not constant over the range of wages. At low wages an overproportional part of the wage gap is due to discrimination. In a further analysis of specific individuals we examine the wage gap at different quantiles and propose a new measure to assess equal earnings opportunities. These additional results reveal that it is primarily low education that causes the large discrimination component at low wages. First version received: April 1999/Final version accepted: July 2000     

THE GENDER WAGE GAP: WHAT HAS HAPPENED BETWEEN 1973 AND 1990 IN AUSTRALIA?*

The current study examines the change in the gender wage gap in Australia over the period 1973 to 1990. The Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1991) decomposition is used in order to evaluate the role and relative contribution of changes in observed and unobserved skills and their prices. The sensitivity of conclusions to the measure of labour market experience and industry and occupation structure are also examined. The analysis concludes that gender-specific effects are dominant in male-female wage convergence although wage-structure effects also play a minor role.     

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.     

Expected work experience and the gender wage gap: A new human capital measure

Work experience is a key variable in earnings function estimates and wage gap decompositions. Because data on actual work experience are rare, studies commonly use proxies, such as potential experience. But potential experience is identical for all individuals of the same age and level of education, so it ignores labor market intermittency because of childbirth and child rearing—a critical omission when analyzing gender differences in earnings. This paper constructs a better proxy: expected work experience, which is the sum of the annual probabilities that an individual worked in the past. This measure can be generated using commonly available data on labor force participation rates by age and gender to gauge the probability of past work. Applying the measure to labor force survey data from the Philippines shows that conventional proxies underestimate the contribution of gender differences in work experience in explaining the gender wage gap.     

The gender wage gap among China’s rural–urban migrants

In this study, we present new empirical evidence on gender wage differences among rural–urban migrants in China. We use a data set that includes migrants residing in urban communities and those living at their workplaces—the latter were not included in the previous studies. We find that the gender wage gap among migrants is 16%–18% and does not differ between migrants living at workplaces and those living in urban communities. However, gender differences in industry sorting play a more important role for migrants living at their workplaces, whereas differences in education and experience are of importance for those living in urban communities. Overall, differences in the returns to characteristics are the main driver of the gender wage gap, especially for migrants living in urban communities.