Distributional Changes in the Gender Wage Gap

Sonja de New and Mathias Sinning ()

No 5303, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper analyzes changes in wage differentials between white men and white women over the period 1993-2006 across the entire wage distribution using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data. We decompose distributional changes in the gender wage gap to assess the contribution of observed characteristics measuring individual productivity. We find that the gender wage gap narrowed by more than 13 percent at the lowest decile and by less than 4 percent at the highest decile. The decomposition results indicate that changes in the gender wage gap are mainly attributable to changes in educational attainment at the top of the wage distribution, while a sizeable part of the changes is due to work history changes at the bottom. Our findings suggest that the educational success of women could reduce the gender wage gap at the bottom of the distribution both before and during the 1990s but did not trigger a strong decline at the top of the distribution until today.

Keywords: gender wage gap; decomposition analysis; unconditional quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 J16 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 2014, 67 (2), 335-361

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Related works:
Journal Article: Distributional Changes in the Gender Wage Gap (2014)
Working Paper: Distributional Changes in the Gender Wage Gap (2010)
Working Paper: Distributional Changes in the Gender Wage Gap (2010)
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