Decomposing the GenderWage Gap with Sample Selection Adjustment: Evidence from Colombia

Alejandro Badel () and Ximena Peña

No 7725, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: Despite the remarkable improvement of female labor market characteristics, a sizeablegender wage gap exists in Colombia. We employ quantile regression techniques to examine the degree to which current small differences in the distribution of observablecharacteristics can explain the gender gap. We find that the gap is largely explained bygender differences in the rewards to labor market characteristics and not by differences in the distribution of characteristics. We claim that Colombian women experience both a glass ceiling effect´´ and also (what we call) a "quicksand floor effect" because gender differences in returns to characteristics primarily affect women at the top and the bottom of the distribution. Also, self selection into the labor force is crucial for gender gaps: if all women participated in the labor force, the observed gap would be roughly 50% larger at all quantiles."

Keywords: Gender gap; Mincer; wage; semiparametric; quantile regression; selection. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 J22 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25
Date: 2010-11-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/8232/dcede2010-37.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Decomposing the Gender Wage Gap with Sample Selection Adjustment: Evidence from Colombia (2010)
Working Paper: Decomposing the gender wage gap with sample selection adjustment: evidence from Colombia (2010)
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:col:000089:007725

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Universidad De Los Andes-Cede ().