Unequal Pay or Unequal Employment? A Cross‐Country Analysis of Gender Gaps

By Claudia Olivetti, Barbara Petrongolo. Journal of Labor Economics, 2006

494 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze gender wage gaps correcting for sample selection induced by nonemployment. We recover wages for the nonemployed using alternative imputation techniques, simply requiring assumptions on the position of imputed wages with respect to the median. We obtain higher median wage gaps on imputed rather than actual wage distributions for several OECD countries. However, this difference is small in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most central and northern EU countries and becomes sizable in southern EU countries, where gender employment gaps are high. Selection correction explains nearly half of the observed negative correlation between wage and employment gaps.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bc064070819bdd32a1ace4608376d71f132100b

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Citations in the corpus

Trends in Quality-Adjusted Skill Premia in the United States, 1960-2000 (2009, background): “See, for example, Keane et al. (1988), Blundell et al. (2003), Chandra (2003), Heckman and Todd (2003), Neal (2004), Blundell et al. (2007), Mulligan and Rubinstein (2008), Petrongolo and Olivetti (2008), among others.”
Gender Wage Gap: A Semi-Parametric Approach with Sample Selection Correction (2011, unknown): “5See also Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008) who analyse for EU countries and the US the gender wage gap at the median of the distribution by correcting for selection into the work force.”
How Does Monetary Policy Affect Income and Wealth Inequality? Evidence from Quantitative Easing in the Euro Area (2018, methodology): “Alternative imputation methods based on matching techniques could be considered; see, e.g., Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008) and many others.”
The Economic Situation of First and Second-Generation Immigrants in France, Germany and the United Kingdom (2010, background): “Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008) show that the gender pay gap tends to be lower in countries with low female employment rates because low-skilled women are much less likely to work.”
The Career Costs of Children (2017, background): “There is a long tradition in economics—dating back to the seminal work of Heckman (1974) and including work by Blau and Kahn (1996), Blundell et al. (2007), Mulligan and Rubinstein (2008), and Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008)—of evaluating the selection of women into the labor market.”
Taxation and Labor Supply of Married Couples Across Countries: A Macroeconomic Analysis (2018, unknown): “A series of papers (Prescott (2004), Rogerson (2006), Rogerson (2008), Ohanian et al.”
Gender gaps and the structure of local labor markets (2020, unknown): “[47] Olivetti, Claudia, and Barbara Petrongolo.”
Gender wage gaps, ‘sticky floors’ and ‘glass ceilings’ in Europe ☆ (2013, methodology): “While a number of important studies have addressed some of these issues for some European countries (see, inter alia, Albrecht et al (2003), Arulampalam et al (2007), de la Rica et al (2008), Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008), Albrecht et al (2009), and Nicodemo (2009)), this paper focuses on the mean ”
Selection, Investment, and Women's Relative Wages Over Time (2008, background): “The other series are based on selection corrections—one series for each of the methods—and show very little relative gains for women.”
The Gender Gap between Earnings Distributions (2019, methodology): “Blau and Kahn (2006) and Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008) recover the “true”median wages for women, using the fact thatmedian wages are not much affected by inclusion of imputed values that are either lower or upper bounds of the wages.”
The U.S. Gender Pay Gap in the 1990S: Slowing Convergence (2006, unknown): “And using a selection correction similar to ours, Olivetti and Petrongolo (2006) find that selection explains about 60% of the cross-country (negative) correlation between the gender pay gap and the gender employment gap.”
Grandparents’ Childcare and Female Labor Force Participation (2013, background): “…in OLS is unclear, IV estimates are likely to overestimate the effect of grandparental childcare on young women’s labor force participation because women from a disadvantaged background are less likely to work (Olivetti and Petrongolo, 2008) and seem more likely to have a deceased mother (Table 2).”
The Cycle of Earnings Inequality: Evidence from Spanish Social Security Data (2017, unknown): “The percentage of previous earnings imputed depends on the number of months in unemployment as follows: 70% (1-6 months), 60% (6-24), 50% (25-48), 40% (49-72), 30% (73-96), 20% (97-120), and 10% (>120).”