Discrimination in a Search-Match Model with Self-Employment

Jonathan Lain

No 2016-02, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: In this paper, we build a search-match model to help explain differences in the outcomes of women and men in urban African labour markets. First, we use longitudinal data from a panel collected in four of Ghana's largest cities to establish a set of stylised facts relating to the size of different sectors in the economy, the earnings gaps that persist within those sectors, and transitions between different jobs. We then construct a model, which allows for individual heterogeneity and participation in both self- and wage-employment, as well as discrimination against female workers in the wage sector. By numerically solving and simulating this model, we show that wage sector discrimination leads to average earnings gaps in all sectors of the economy, even if the underlying ability distribution is the same for both sexes. This result arises because discrimination creates extra frictions for women, making it harder for them to select jobs according to comparative advantage. We also conduct a series of experiments to examine how women and men may be affected differently by government policy, and consider the robustness of our results to alternative assumptions about individual heterogeneity.

Keywords: Search Models; Discrimination; Comparative Advantage; Self-Employment; Informal Sectors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J46 J60 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dge, nep-iue and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:e7f9eb37-1fc8-4a10-9bb8-23b0f55ba7a4 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2016-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().