Job Prospects and Pay Gaps: Theory and Evidence on the Gender Gap from U.S. Cities

Benjamin Sand () and Chris Bidner

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University

Abstract: Are differences in the quality of workers' prospects outside of their current employment relationship influential in generating pay differentials? We consider the role of an economy's industrial structure in generating differences in outside prospects, and apply our analysis to the gender pay gap in the U.S. during the 1980-2010 period. We develop a formal search and matching model that connects outside prospects, industrial structure and wage gaps and use it to guide our subsequent empirical analysis of local labor markets. Our results suggest that an economy's within-industry gender pay gap-which also controls for human capital characteristics-is substantially influenced by gender differences in the quality of outside prospects generated by the economy's industrial structure. Our analysis reveals that the relatively sharp narrowing of the gender pay gap during the 1980s is accounted for by the relatively sharp decline in the outside prospects of men during this period.

Keywords: Gender Pay Gap; Search Frictions; Industrial Structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47
Date: 2016-11-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dge, nep-gen, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sfu.ca/econ-research/RePEc/sfu/sfudps/dp16-14.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:sfu:sfudps:dp16-14

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Working Paper Coordinator ().