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Title: Gender Wage Gap Trends in Europe: The Role of Occupational Allocation and Changing Skill Prices
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2012
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Abstract: The aim of this paper is to explore the gender wage gap trends in European labor markets taking a comparative perspective across various countries: Austria, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK. Using the Occupational Information Network data and the harmonized data for the years 1995-2009 from the European Community Household Panel and European Union Statistics on Income and LivingConditions, we determine the evolution of relative "brain" and "brawn" skill intensity of jobs held by women and men. Then, given the occupational allocation of males and females, we estimate the returns to "brains" and "brawns" in each year and analyze the trends in returns to those skills. Our results suggest that, despite the increasing over-representation of women in brain skill intensive occupations, returns to "brain" versus "brawn" skills did not change in favor of "brains" between 1995 and 2009 in European labor markets. Our decomposition analysis reveals that the change in worker composition is the major factor that explains the narrowing gender wage gap between 1995 and 2009 in the European labor markets.
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Authors: Kaya, Ezgi
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Institution: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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