The Rules of the Game: Local Wage Bargaining and the Gender Pay Gap

Maria Olsson and Oskar Skans

No 25128, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: To study how local bargaining institutions affect within-job gender wage gaps, we exploit the fact that most Swedish firms tend to have one collective agreement covering all their blue-collar workers. This implies that workers performing the same tasks in different firms are covered by different types of agreements. Our results show that gender pay gaps are smaller when agreements guarantee a yearly minimum pay raise for each worker. The patterns also hold within firms as gender wage gaps in other occupations are uncorrelated with blue-collar rigidities. Bargaining constraints affect gender equality more in female-underrepresented settings and in low-productive firms.

Keywords: Collective bargaining; Gender equality; Unions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J31 J51 J52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/25128.pdf (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:crm:wpaper:25128

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Moritz Lubczyk () and Matthew Nibloe ().