Wage Differentials in Israel: Endowments, Occupational Segregation, Discrimination, and Selectivity

Muhammad Asali

No 011-08, Working Papers from International School of Economics at TSU, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia

Abstract: I use a panel of cross sections income data between 1991 and 2003 to measure wage differentials between Israeli-Arab and Jewish workers in Israel. The wage gap discovered is decomposed into components corresponding to human capital, occupational segregation, selectivity, and a residual, which may reflect discrimination. The unadjusted hourly wage gap between Arab and Jewish workers almost doubled from 40% in 1991 to 77% in 1999. By 2003, however, it had declined to 56%. The study shows large fluctuations in the wage gap. Human capital differences explain a major part of the wage gap, but its contribution is susceptible to the non-discriminatory norm adopted. Occupational segregation accounts for about a third of the wage gap. Because sudden changes in the underlying characteristics of the populations are not likely - these were actually slightly converging over the study period - large part of the changes in the wage gap are likely to be due to labor market discrimination.

Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2008-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://iset.tsu.ge/files/011-08.pdf First version, 2008 (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:tbs:wpaper:08-011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from International School of Economics at TSU, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).