Discriminate me - if you can! The disappearance of the gender pay gap among public-contest selected employees

Carolina Castagnetti, Luisa Rosti and Marina Töpfer

No 103, Discussion Papers from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Chair of Labour and Regional Economics

Abstract: This paper analyzes the effect of public-contest recruitment on earnings for men and women using Italian microdata over a time period of ten years. We find that the gender pay gap vanishes and even reverses among the young, when employees are selected through public contests. The results suggest that selection mechanisms such as public contests may offer a way for merit-based and gender-fair wage setting. However, since public contests and the public sector are highly correlated, we analyze the gender pay gap taking the interconnection between the public and private sector as well as the open contest issue into account. By decomposing our results by sector we find that public contests represent a necessary but not sufficient condition for merit-based and gender-fair recruitment. Similarly, the institutional environment of the public sector is a necessary but not sufficient condition for making public contests merit-based and gender-fair screening devices. These two factors taken together, cause the disappearance of the gender pay gap.

Keywords: Gender Pay Gap; Public-Contest Recruitment; Double Sample Selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J31 J7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-gen and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/175376/1/1014471494.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Discriminate Me – if You Can! The Disappearance of the Gender Pay Gap among Public-Contest Selected Employees (2018)
Working Paper: Discriminate me - if you can! The Disappearance of the Gender Pay Gap among Public-Contest Selected Employees (2016)
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:zbw:faulre:103

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Chair of Labour and Regional Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().