Browsing by Subject "Lohnstruktur"

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Recent developments in gender differences in pay
(2017) Töpfer, Marina; Beißinger, Thomas
Gender differences in pay continue to persist, despite decades of equal-pay legislation and the promotion of equal opportunities. This thesis examines differences in pay between men and women in Italy during the period 2005-2014 and puts special emphasis on the effects of sample selection. It decomposes the gender pay gap in different subsamples and identifies drivers of the gap that remained unobserved so far. In particular, it shows the empirical disappearance of the gender pay gap in Italy for public-contest recruited employees. It further reveals that the wage gap between men and women for overeducated workers is mainly explained by generally unobservable characteristics. From the methodological perspective, this work provides two novelties. First, it adds to the literature on quantile-regression approaches by adjusting the wage model based on unconditional quantile regression for sample selection. Second, an alternative estimation approach that builds on the omitted variable bias formula is proposed, in order to directly estimate the change of the gender pay gap and its components over time. The empirical part of this thesis is based on a large Italian data set (ISFOL PLUS 2005-2014). The case of Italy is particularly interesting for the study of gender differences in pay and gender-specific selection into wage work given low levels of the aggregate gender pay gap (approximately 6.0%) on the one hand, and high employment gaps between men and women (more than 20.0%) on the other hand.
The convergence of the gender pay gap : an alternative estimation approach
(2017) Töpfer, Marina; Castagnetti, Carolina; Rosti, Luisa
So far, little work has been done on directly estimating differences of wage gaps. Studies estimating pay differentials, generally compare them across different subsamples. This comparison does not allow to conduct any inference or, in the case of decompositions, to confront the respective decomposition components across subsamples. We propose an exten- sion of an Oaxaca-Blinder type decomposition based on the omitted variable bias formula to directly estimate the change in pay gaps across subsamples. The method proposed can be made robust to the index-number problem of the standard Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and to the indeterminacy problem of the intercept-shift approach. Using Italian micro data, we estimate the difference in the gender pay gap across time (2005 and 2014). By applying our proposed decomposition, we find that the convergence of the gender pay gap over time is only driven by the catching-up of women in terms of observable characteristics, while the impact of anti-discrimination legislation is found to be negligible.
The reversal of the gender pay gap among public-contestselected young employees
(2015) Töpfer, Marina; Castagnetti, Carolina; Rosti, Luisa
This paper analyzes the effect of public-contest recruitment on earnings by applying an extended version of the Oaxaca-Blinder model with double selection to microdata on Italy. We find that the gender pay gap vanishes among public-contest selected employees, and even reverses in favor of women (-17.4%) in the young sample. The reversal is because public contests are merit-based and gender-fair screening devices. They are merit-based because selected employees possess higher productive characteristics than unselected ones, both women and men. They are gender-fair because the coefficients component in the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition is never significant among public-contest recruited employees, either with or without selection. On the contrary, among employees not hired by public contest the gender pay gap is positive and significant (7.6%), and it is entirely due to coefficients, that is to discrimination in the career path.