Does Comparable Worth Work in a Decentralized Labor Market?

Michael Baker and Nicole M. Fortin

No 7937, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We investigate the effect of pro-active comparable worth legislation covering both the public and private sectors on wages, the gender wage gap and the gender composition of employment. The focus is the pay equity initiative of the Canadian province of Ontario in the early 1990s. We document substantial lapses in compliance and problems with the implementation of the law among smaller firms where the majority of men and women work. This evidence provides important lessons of the obstacles to extending pay equity to the private sector of a decentralized labor market. When we focus on those sectors of the labor market where compliance was relatively strict, our results suggest that any positive effects on the wages of women in female jobs were very modest. Our most consistently estimated effects of the law on wages are negative: slower wage growth for women in male jobs and for men in female jobs.

JEL-codes: J16 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-10
Note: LS
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7937.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: Does Comparable Worth Work in a Decentralized Labor Market? (2000)
Working Paper: Does Comparable Worth Work in a Decentralized Labor Market? (2000)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7937

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7937
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().