The structure of wages during the economic transition in Romania

I use cross-sectional individual data from the 1994 Integrated Household Survey (IHS) of Romania to analyze the determinants of male and female wages in public and private enterprises. Using quantile regression I estimate the rate of return to education and experience at different quantiles of the wage distribution. Higher levels of education are significantly associated with higher wages for both males and females in public firms. In private firms, only college education is correlated with significantly higher wages. I also find that there are no significant differences in the returns to human capital at the median and at the upper and lower tail of the distribution of gender-specific wages in each sector. Differences in individual characteristics are found to explain the highest portion of the male–female wage differential in Romania in both sectors.