Rent Sharing and the Gender Bargaining Gap: Evidence from the Banking Sector

Sena Coskun, Hermann Gartner and Ahmet Ali Taskin

No 20752, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We use the removal of public bank guarantees in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment to estimate the gender bargaining power gap. Using comprehensive wage data from the universe of banking employees, combined with bank-level financial information, we find that women have approximately two-thirds of the bargaining power of men. Our model-based analysis suggests that this gender bargaining gap alone accounts for 16 to 28\% of the observed gender wage gap in the sector. These findings highlight an important driver of gender inequality: changes in firm profitability can reduce the gender wage gap, even without improvements in structural gender equality. This effect has significant implications for high-rent, high-inequality industries such as finance, where rent-sharing mechanisms favor male employees.

JEL-codes: G21 G28 J16 J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
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