 The social pay gap across occupations: Experimental evidenceElisabeth Sattler-Bublitz and Tobias Regner Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2022, vol. 97, issue C Abstract: Although receiving equal wages for work of equal value is a legal right in many countries, there is evidence that it does not hold for social occupations (e.g., health care, education). Considering this existing wage penalty or social pay gap, we design a laboratory experiment that mimics actual income distributions (Germany, USA), incorporates social occupations in the lab society, and allows for (voluntary) redistribution among subjects. The results show that – regardless of (non-)random assignment to social jobs and the level of income inequality – individuals in social jobs are only partly compensated for their social effort in a market design. Indeed, a downward spiral, induced by emotional reactions, emerges as social effort and donations converge to a ‘low’ equilibrium. These results suggest that a market approach fails to eliminate the social pay gap. Keywords: Inequality; Redistribution; Experiment; Voluntary payments; Social returns; Externality (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:97:y:2022:i:c:s2214804321001506 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2021.101810 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.