Competition and the Gender Wage Gap: New Evidence from Linked Employer-Employee Data in Hungary 1986-2003 (original) (raw)

The levelling effect of product market competition on gender wage discrimination

IZA Journal of Labor Economics, 2014

Using linked employer-employee panel data for West Germany that include direct information on the competition faced by plants, we investigate the effect of product market competition on the gender pay gap. Controlling for match fixed effects, we find that intensified competition significantly lowers the unexplained gap in plants with neither collective agreements nor a works council. Conversely, there is no effect in plants with these types of worker codetermination, which are unlikely to have enough discretion to adjust wages in the short run. We also document a larger competition effect in plants with few females in their workforces. Our findings are in line with Beckerian taste-based employer wage discrimination that is limited by competitive forces.

Does market liberalisation reduce gender discrimination

An alleged achievement of socialism was gender equality in the labour market. Has its collapse shattered this accomplishment? The theoretical literature and attendant empirical evidence are inconclusive. Using data for 2.9 million wage earners in Hungary, we find that the male -female difference in log wages declined from 0.31 to 0.19 between 1986 and 1998 and that this is largely explained by a matching decline in ''Oaxaca's discrimination,'' suggesting extraordinary improvement of women's relative situation. Further, we find that variation over time in the wage gaps is associated with public and large firms having progressively smaller gaps than their counterparts.

An Estimation of the Productivity-Wage Gap in Hungary 1986-2005

2009

In this paper we seek to provide new empirical evidence on the relative productivities and wages of various worker groups (by gender, age, and education), based on longitudinal matched employer-employee data from Hungary covering 1986-2005. We estimate the productivity and wage gaps from firm-level production functions and wage equations, using firm-level data on productive inputs and output, wage costs, and the demographic composition of the work force obtained from the linked worker data. This methodology allows us to assess whether productive differences can account for the wage gaps between worker groups, as well as the evolution of these gaps following the transition to a free market.

Occupational gender composition and wages in Romania: from planned equality to market inequality

2007

From Planned Equality to Market Inequality? * In Romania, the communist regime promoted an official policy of gender equality for more than 40 years, providing equal access to education and employment, and restricting pay differentiation based on gender. After its fall in December 1989, the promotion of equal opportunities and treatment for women and men did not constitute a priority for any of the governments of the 1990s. Given that both the economic mechanisms and the institutional settings changed radically, the question is if this affected gender equality. This paper analyzes both gender and occupational wage gaps in Romania before and during the first years of transition from a planned to a market economy. The results suggest that the communist institutions did succeed in eliminating the gender wage differences in female-and male-dominated occupations, but not in gender-integrated occupations, for which the gender wage gap was about 32%. During the transitions years, this gap decreased to 20-24%, while the gender wag gap in male and female-dominated occupations increased to 15%.

The Gender Wage Gap in Bulgaria: A Semiparametric Estimation of Discrimination

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2002

Bulgaria's transition to a market economy has coincided with a large increase in wage inequality. Given the emphasis on wage leveling in pre-transition Bulgaria, the rise in wage inequality may be due to managers rewarding more productive workers; or it may be the result of rewarding non-economic characteristics such as gender. Using data from the 1995, nationally representative Bulgaria Integrated Household Survey, I examine whether gender discrimination is an important factor determining the gap in wages between men and women and the extent to which gender discrimination affects wage inequality. I model wage determination with a correction for sample selection as a Type III Tobit and estimate this model with the Honoré et al. (1997) semiparametric estimator. Unlike the classic Heckman correction for sample selection, this estimator is consistent in the presence of heteroscedasticity. I bootstrap to estimate standard errors. Using separate wage regression estimates for men and women, an Oaxaca decomposition indicates that women's wages are 25 percent lower than men's wages and 85 percent of this differential is due to discrimination, or more precisely, due to differences in how men and women are rewarded for the same characteristics.

Gender wage discrimination in the Turkish labor market

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2007

While the topic of gender equality turns out to be an important element in the preparation of Turkey to join the European Union, very little empirical research on this issue has been done using Turkish data. This paper aims to contribute toward filling this gap. We propose an estimate of the wage discrimination in Turkey relying on different decompositions of the gender wage differential. The data set used is the 2003 Turkish Household Budget Survey. In Turkey, the observed average gender wage gap is about 25.2% in favor of men for the salaried population, and around 60% of it may be attributed to discrimination. In terms of gender wage discrimination, with an observed wage gap close to those observed in France and Italy, and a discrimination component close to the ones obtained in Spain and Greece with comparable methods, Turkey happens to do not so bad. But, in the Turkish case, wage discrimination appears to be a bad indicator of gender inequalities in the labor market, as exclusion and segregation of women are the main concerns.