The Effects of Austerity Measures on Gender Gaps in Labor Market Outcomes

Jelena Zarkovic Rakic, Marko Vladisavljevic and Jorge Davalos

Working Papers PMMA from PEP-PMMA

Abstract: Recent empirical evidence, largely based on descriptive analyses, suggests that women’s wages and employment are more likely to be affected by government austerity measures because women constitute a majority of the public-sector labor force. Employing panel data from the 2014 and 2015 Labour Force Survey as pre- and post-treatment periods, we provide an econometric assessment of the effects of a 10% public-sector wage cut in Serbia that was introduced at the beginning of 2015. Wage cuts mandated by austerity measures increased the likelihood that younger and older women workers would transition into unemployment and inactivity, while no such effect was identified for men. On the other hand, evidence of heterogeneous compliance with the wage cut across public subsectors. State-owned enterprises, a subsector dominated by men, exhibited lower compliance with wage cuts compared to the state-sector, which is dominated by women. The difference in compliance prevented wage cuts from having the positive effect they could have had on the gender wage gap.

Keywords: gender; labor market transition; wages; austerity; Serbia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H61 J16 J21 J31 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-hme, nep-lma and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://portal.pep-net.org/document/download/32764 (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:lvl:pmmacr:2019-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers PMMA from PEP-PMMA Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis ().