Regional heterogeneity in wage distributions. Evidence from Spain

Elisabet Motellón, Enrique Lopez-Bazo and Mayssun El-Attar ()
Additional contact information
Mayssun El-Attar: Faculty of Economics, University of Barcelona and European University Institute.

No 200903, IREA Working Papers from University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics

Abstract: Regional differences in real wages have been shown to be both large and persistent in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as in the economies of other countries. Empirical evidence suggests that wage differentials adjusted for the cost of living cannot only be explained by the unequal spatial distribution of characteristics determining earnings. Rather, average wage gap decomposition reveals the important contribution made by regional heterogeneity in the price assigned to these characteristics. This paper proposes a method for assessing regional disparities in the entire wage distribution and for decomposing the effect of differences across regions in the endowments and prices of the characteristics. The hypothesis forwarded is that the results from previous studies obtained by comparing average regional wages may be partial and non-robust. Empirical evidence from a matched employer-employee dataset for Spain confirms marked differences in wage distributions between regions, which do not result from worker and firm characteristics but from the increasing role of regional differences in the return to human capital.

Keywords: Regional Labour Markets; Human Capital; Wage Gap Decomposition; Counterfactual Distributions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2009-02, Revised 2009-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ub.edu/irea/working_papers/2009/200903.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: REGIONAL HETEROGENEITY IN WAGE DISTRIBUTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM SPAIN (2011)
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:ira:wpaper:200903

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IREA Working Papers from University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alicia García ().