Statistical Discrimination and Gender Wage Gap: A Model

Xia Li ()
Additional contact information
Xia Li: School of Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai 200433, China

Frontiers of Economics in China-Selected Publications from Chinese Universities, 2012, vol. 7, issue 2, 286-304

Abstract: In this paper, I extend the model in Coate and Loury (CL) (1993) to show how statistical discrimination by employers can help create gender wage gap for men and women with equal earning potentials. Given that employers do not perfectly observe a worker¡¯s skill type and partly rely on the average skills level of his (her) peers for inference purpose, employers¡¯ differential treatment of male and female workers can create different skill-investment incentives for them, which in turn justify employers¡¯ discrimination in the first place. The second result of this paper which is not possible within the original CL framework is that I point to the possibility that there exist circumstances under which the gender wage gap can not be eliminated without the formerly advantaged sex being negatively affected.

Keywords: gender wage gap; home production; statistical discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J24 J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journal.hep.com.cn/fec/EN/10.3868/s060-001-012-0013-0 (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:fec:journl:v:7:y:2012:i:2:p:286-304

Access Statistics for this article

Frontiers of Economics in China-Selected Publications from Chinese Universities is currently edited by LONG Jie

More articles in Frontiers of Economics in China-Selected Publications from Chinese Universities from Higher Education Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Frank H. Liu ().