Pseudo-Panel Decomposition of the Blinder–Oaxaca Gender Wage Gap

Jhon James Mora () and Diana Yaneth Herrera
Additional contact information
Jhon James Mora: Departmento de Economia, Universidad Icesi, Cali 760031, Colombia
Diana Yaneth Herrera: Departmento de Economia, Universidad Icesi, Cali 760031, Colombia

Econometrics, 2025, vol. 13, issue 3, 1-16

Abstract: This article introduces a novel approach to decomposing the Blinder–Oaxaca gender wage gap using pseudo-panel data. In many developing countries, panel data are not available; however, understanding the evolution of the gender wage gap over time requires tracking individuals longitudinally. When individuals change across time periods, estimators tend to be inconsistent and inefficient. To address this issue, and building upon the traditional Blinder–Oaxaca methodology, we propose an alternative procedure that follows cohorts over time rather than individuals. This approach enables the estimation of both the explained and unexplained components—“endowment effect” and “remuneration effect”—of the wage gap, along with their respective standard errors, even in the absence of true panel data. We apply this methodology to the case of Colombia, finding a gender wage gap of approximately 15% in favor of male cohorts. This gap comprises a −5.6% explained component and a 20% unexplained component without controls. When we control by informality, size of the firm and sector the gap comprises a −3.5% explained component and a 18.7% unexplained component.

Keywords: pseudo-panel; Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition; selection bias; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B23 C C00 C01 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1146/13/3/27/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1146/13/3/27/ (text/html)

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:gam:jecnmx:v:13:y:2025:i:3:p:27-:d:1705247

Access Statistics for this article

Econometrics is currently edited by Ms. Jasmine Liu

More articles in Econometrics from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().