Public-Private Wage Gap in Australia: Variation Along the Distribution

Lixin Cai and Amy Y.C. Liu ()

No 581, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

Abstract: Previous research on public-private wage differentials in Australia is scarce and has focused on the central parts of the conditional wage distribution. Using the first six waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, this study applies quantile regression models to examine whether the sectoral wage effect varies along the wage distribution. For females, we find public sector wage premiums for almost the entire wage distribution and the premiums are relatively stable except at the extremities of the distribution. For males, the premiums decrease monotonically and are negative for the top half of the conditional wage distribution. The decomposition results show that the observed differences in individuals and job characteristics account for a substantial proportion of the overall sectoral wage gap.

Keywords: wage gap; quantile regression; decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ifn and nep-lab
Date: 2008-06
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:auu:dpaper:581

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