Monopsonistic Discrimination, Worker Turnover, and the Gender Wage Gap

By Erling Barth, H. Dale-Olsen. Social Science Research Network, 2009

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motivated by models of worker flows, we argue in this paper that monopsonistic discrimination may be a substantial factor behind the overall gender wage gap. On matched employer-employee data from Norway, we estimate establishment-specific wage premiums separately for men and women, conditioning on fixed individual effects. Regressions of worker turnover on the wage premium identify less wage elastic labour supply facing each establishment of women than that of men. Workforce gender composition is strongly related to employers' wage policies. The results suggest that 70-90 percent of the gender wage gap for low-educated workers may be attributed to differences in labour market frictions between men and women, while the similar figures for high-educated workers ranges from 20 to 70 percent.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/29e7e1b6cff9c5be6978c3ded180096b4bb57724

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 Public Administration

Citations in the corpus

Bargaining, Sorting, and the Gender Wage Gap: Quantifying the Impact of Firms on the Relative Pay of Women (2016, unknown): “As pointed out by Barth and Dale-Olsen (2009), this framework has been largely ignored in the gender wage literature.”
Differences in Labor Supply to Monopsonistic Firms and the Gender Pay Gap: An Empirical Analysis Using Linked Employer‐Employee Data from Germany (2010, methodology): “…our results confirm and extend the two other attempts made to investigate women’s and men’s labor supply elasticities, namely, the studies of Barth and Dale-Olsen (2009) and Ransom and Oaxaca (2010), since our analysis is built on less restrictive assumptions and explicitly controls for…”
The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations (2017, background): “Internationally, Barth and Dale-Olsen (2009) and Hirsch, Schank, and Schnabel (2010) find evidence using matched employer–employee data that men’s turnover is more wage elastic than women’s in Norway and Germany, respectively.”