Firm-level Evidence on Gender Wage Discrimination in the Belgian Private Economy

Vincent Vandenberghe

No 2011016, LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)

Abstract: In this paper we explore a matched employer-employee data set to investigate the presence of gender wage discrimination in the Belgian private economy labour market. Contrary to many existing papers, we analyse gender wage discrimination using an independent productivity measure. Using firm-level data, we are able to compare direct estimates of a gender productivity differential with those of a gender wage differential. We take advantage of the panel structure to identify gender-related differences from within-firm variation. Moreover, inspired by recent developments in the production function estimation literature, we address the problem of endogeneity of the gender mix using a structural production function estimator (Olley & Pakes, 1996; Levinsohn & Petrin, 2003) alongside IV-GMM methods where lagged value of labour inputs are used as instruments. Our results suggest that there is no gender wage discrimination inside private firms located in Belgium, on the contrary.

Keywords: gender wage discrimination; labour productivity; structural production function estimation; IV-GMM; firm-level panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C52 D24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27
Date: 2011-04-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

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Journal Article: Firm‐level Evidence on Gender Wage Discrimination in the Belgian Private Economy (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvir:2011016

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