Gender Differences in Job Search: Trading off COMMUTE AGAINST WAGE*
By T. L. Barbanchon, Roland Rathelot, Alexandra Roulet. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020
272 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We relate gender differences in willingness to commute to the gender wage gap. Using French administrative data on job search criteria, we first document that unemployed women have a lower reservation wage and a shorter maximum acceptable commute than their male counterparts. We identify indifference curves between wage and commute using the joint distributions of reservation job attributes and accepted job bundles. Indifference curves are steeper for women, who value commute around 20% more than men. Controlling in particular for the previous job, newly hired women are paid after unemployment 4% less per hour and have a 12% shorter commute than men. Through the lens of a job search model where commuting matters, we estimate that gender differences in commute valuation can account for a 0.5 log point hourly wage deficit for women, that is, 14% of the residualized gender wage gap. Finally, we use job application data to test the robustness of our results and to show that female workers do not receive less demand from far-away employers, confirming that most of the gender gap in commute is supply-side driven.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10f20319d5d09075a31f621555f4c61c0c6421a9
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
In Gender Studies
Citations in the corpus
- Work from Home Before and After the COVID-19 Outbreak (2020, unknown): “Finally, using French administrative data, Le Barbanchon et al. (2020) find that gender differences in commute valuation can account for a .”
- Gender gaps and the structure of local labor markets (2020, methodology): “Le Barbanchon et al. (2019) show comparable evidence on the age profile of wage and commuting gaps using administrative data on unemployed jobseekers in France.”
- Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap (2020, unknown): “…changing employer.31 To assess the role of job mobility in explaining the gender pay gap, we start by testing 29Research has shown that women have a lower willingness-to-commute than men, possibly because of family obligations (LeBarbanchon et al., 2020; Caldwell and Danieli, 2018; Manning, 2003).”