Search results

Between 1995 and 2012, the wage distribution of male workers in Brazil shifted to the right and became less dispersed. This paper attempts to identify the reasons for that movement in male wage distribution, focusing on the impact of education expansion on wage distribution. The Oaxaca-Blinder (OB) and Recentered Influence Function (RIF) decomposition results show that both changes in returns on skills and upgrades in the composition of work skills contribute to increases in the average wage and wages at the 10th and 50th percentiles. The shifts in returns to skills had a decreasing impact on wages at the 90th percentile and are identified as the primary force reducing wage inequality. Education expansion had an equalizing impact on wage distribution, primarily through the decline in return to education.

We examine the cardinal gap between wage distributions of the incumbents and newly hired workers based on entropic distances which are well-defined welfare theoretic measures. Decomposition of several effects is achieved by identifying several counterfactual distributions of different groups. These go beyond the usual Oaxaca–Blinder decompositions at the (linear) conditional means. Much like quantiles, these entropic distances are well-defined inferential objects and functions whose statistical properties have recently been developed. Going beyond these strong rankings and distances, we consider weak uniform ranking of these wage outcomes based on statistical tests for stochastic dominance. The empirical analysis is focused on employees with at least 35 hours of work in the 1996–2012 monthly Current Population Survey (CPS). Among others, we find incumbent workers enjoy a better distribution of wages, but the attribution of the gap to wage inequality and human capital characteristics varies between quantiles. For instance, highly paid new workers are mainly due to human capital components, and in some years, even better wage structure.

This study investigated the gender wage gap in Nigeria by analysing two waves of household surveys (in 2003–2004 and 2018–2019) in order to understand the dynamics or polarisation of the labour market in Nigeria in terms of the gender wage gap over time.

The study applied an extension of Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition that relies on the re-centred influence function (RIF) regressions to analyse the gender wage gap at all points along the wage distribution.

The results unambiguously show that there is a significant gender wage gap in Nigeria at all points along the wage distribution, such that for the two surveys used and after nearly two decades, men still earn more than women. That is, the log wage difference between males and females is statistically significant at all points between the 10th and the 90th quantiles. In 2003–2004 period, the authors found that most of the wage difference was significantly accounted for by the wage structure effect, whilst the composition effect was negative and only significant at the bottom of the wage distribution. Since the 2018–2019 period, the authors found that there has been a visible change such that most of the gender wage gap is now accounted for by the composition effect at all points along the wage distribution. Another interesting finding is that there has been a general decline in the gender wage gap along the entire wage distribution, such that inequality was higher in 2003–2004 than in 2018–2019. This decline is bigger at the top than at the bottom of the wage distribution. The authors also found that, contrary to some of the studies on the wage gap, the raw gaps for the two surveys appear to show inverted U-shape, but the gap has fallen quickly since the 2018–2019 period. Thus, the authors found strong evidence of a “sticky floor” compared to a “glass ceiling” effect in both periods, and this becomes more pronounced over time. In terms of the contributions of individual covariates on gender pay gap in Nigeria, the authors found that urban residence, unionisation, education and occupation variables exhibit major influence. However, the effects of covariates on the composition and wage structure components of the wage gap have changed over time.

The major policy implication of these findings is that to address the gender wage gap in Nigeria, policy should focus more on how labour is rewarded and improving human capital for women.

This study is a novel paper in Nigeria that has investigated the gender wage gap in Nigeria by extending the focus of literature in three ways. First, the authors applied an extension of Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition that relies on the RIF regressions to analyse the gender wage gap at all points along the wage distribution. Second, the authors used sample selection bias to account for the non-randomness of participation in wage employment. And third, the authors applied similar analysis to two waves of household surveys (in 2003/2004 and 2018/2019) in order to understand the dynamics or polarisation of the labour market in Nigeria in terms of the gender wage gap over time.

Many developing and transition countries, and even some in the industrialized West, experience periods in which a substantial proportion of the workforce suffer wage arrears. We examine the implications for estimates of wage gaps and inequality using the Russian labor market as a test case. Wage inequality grew rapidly as did the incidence of wage arrears in Russia in the 1990s. Given data on wages and the incidence of wage arrears we construct counterfactual wage distributions, which give the distribution of pay were arrears not present. The results suggest that wage inequality could be some 30 percent lower in the absence of arrears. If individuals in arrears are distributed across the underlying wage distribution, as appears to be the case in Russia, we show that it may be feasible to use the wage distribution for the subset of those not in arrears to estimate the underlying population wage distribution parameters.

Building on recent advances in inverse probability weighted identification and estimation of counterfactual distributions, the authors examine the history of wage earnings for women and their potential wage distributions in the United States. These potentials are two counterfactuals, what if women received men’s market “rewards” for their own “skills,” and what if they received the women’s rewards but for men’s characteristics? Using the Current Population Survey data from 1976 to 2013, the authors analyze the entire counterfactual distributions to separate the “structure” and human capital “composition” effect. In contrast to Maasoumi and Wang (2019), the reference outcome in these decompositions is women’s observed earnings distribution, and inverse probability methods are employed, rather than the conditional quantile approaches. The authors provide decision theoretic measures of the distance between two distributions, to complement assessments based on mean, median, or particular quantiles. We assess uniform rankings of alternate distributions by tests of stochastic dominance in order to identify evaluations robust to subjective measures. Traditional moment-based measures severely underestimate the declining trend of the structure effect. Nevertheless, dominance rankings suggest that the structure (“discrimination”?) effect is bigger than human capital characteristics.

Analyzes the wage structure and wage distribution for male and female Polish workers during a more mature phase of a transition to a market economy, namely 1994‐2001. The results indicate an overall rise in earnings inequality for both genders during this period. Contrary to conventional expectations, changes in the composition of employment caused by a deep restructuring process did not have a significant impact on earnings inequality. Throughout this period, the changes in the wage structure and wage distribution were almost entirely due to the changes in returns to worker characteristics. However, does not observe the “explosion of differentials at all levels,” predicted by many leading models on transition. Wage structures for men and women evolved in different ways. This analysis suggests that the effect of changes in labor supply and institutional factors on the wage structure and wage distribution was relatively unimportant. Demand side factors seem to be far more important in explaining the dynamics of earnings inequality in Poland during 1994‐2001.

The purpose of this paper is to examine wage differences between part- and full-time workers distinguishing by gender by using a large Spanish matched employer-employee data set and an econometric decomposition that permits to decompose wage differences by quantiles of the wage distribution.

The research is based on cross-section matched employer-employee microdata from a large representative survey (the Encuesta de Estructura Salarial) which is carried out with a harmonised methodology common to all European Union member countries and that has been designed specifically to provide reliable evidence about characteristics of the wage distribution such us wage differentials associated with the type of working time. From a methodological point of view, the econometric decomposition technique proposed recently by Fortin et al. (2011) to decompose wage differences between part-time and full-time workers by quantiles of the wage distribution is applied. This methodology has the advantage over similar techniques that provides a detailed decomposition of wage differentials and has not been used before to examine the wage impact of part-time jobs.

The results show that the significant raw wage gap that part-time workers experience in Spain differs substantially along the wage distribution. In the case of part-time females, the wage disadvantage is mostly explained by their relative endowments of characteristics (and particularly by their lower endowments of human capital and their segregation into low-wage sectors) but a significant wage penalty still persists, increasing along the wage distribution. In the case of males the wage disadvantage is only found in the lower part of the distribution and it is due both to their worst endowments of characteristics and a significant wage penalty.

The evidence for Spain shows that the part-time work tends to affect differently to the wages of males and females, with a higher part-time penalty for males, as predicted by the “flexibility stigma” hypothesis, and penalising low-qualified men in the lower part of the wage distribution and high-qualified women in the upper part of the distribution the most.

The analysis contributes to the literature by examining wage differences along the wage distribution for both genders using econometric decomposition methods, an aspect that to the authors’ knowledge has been examined only scarcely in the international literature with non-conclusive evidence and has not been examined in previous studies for the Spanish case. In this vein, Spain is a particularly interesting analysis case from an international perspective of the wage consequences of part-time jobs, given that in contrast with most other advanced countries a majority of part-time employment in this country is involuntary and this phenomenon is especially affecting disadvantaged groups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the wage differentials along the entire distribution between immigrants and the Australian-born.

Using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, the authors apply a semi-parametric method (DiNardo et al., 1996) to decompose the distributional wage gap between immigrants and native-born Australians into composition effect and wage structure effect. The authors further apply the unconditional quantile regression (UQR) method (Firpo et al., 2007) to decompose the overall wage structure effect into contributions from individual wage covariates.

Relative to the native-born, both effects favour immigrants from English-speaking countries. For male immigrants from non-English-speaking countries (NESC) the favourable composition effect is offset by disadvantage in the wage structure effect, leaving little overall wage difference. Female immigrants from NESC are disadvantaged at the lower part of the wage distribution.

The increasingly skill-based immigration policy in Australia has increased skill levels of immigrants relative to the Australian-born. However, the playing field may yet to be equal for the recent NESC immigrants due to unfavourable rewards to their productivity factors. Also, immigrants are not homogeneous. Countries of origin and gender matter in affecting wage outcomes.

The unique wage-setting system and the increasingly skill-based immigration policy have made Australia an interesting case. The authors examine the entire wage distribution between migrants and native-born rather than focus on the mean. The authors differentiate immigrants by their country of origin and gender; and apply the UQR decomposition to identify the contributions from individual wage covariates.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the wage distribution in Spain, its evolution in recent years and the implications for increased wage dispersion. Accordingly, its attention focuses on the following issues: first, the paper investigates how personal, job and firm attributes affect the wages distribution and examine earnings differentials between and within groups of workers according to their individual and job characteristics throughout the conditional wage distribution; and second, the paper analyses whether the business cycle may influence the magnitude of these differentials.

Using administrative data from the Spanish Social Security and the Tax Administration National Agency, the paper estimates OLS and quantile regression (QR) models in order to assess the impact of personal, job and workplace attributes on between- and within-groups wage inequality.

Among other things, we find that, although the average wage has been increasing over time (until 2009), changes have not been uniform across the earnings distribution, making the dispersion fall during boom years but rise during downturn years. Furthermore, changes in the impacts of some characteristics (types of contract, education/qualifications, region and employer size) contributed to higher wage dispersion, while others (tenure) made the distribution more equal.

The analysis of the paper in novel in that it investigates whether wage differentials respond to the business cycle and what the source of that variation is. Moreover, it analyses wages differentials not only at the mean but also throughout the conditional earnings distribution, making it possible to assess the impact of these attributes on between- and within-groups wage inequality.