"The Gender Gap in Earnings Between and Within Firms: Evidence from Linked Employer-Employee Data*"

本文研究了公司在确定平均收入和收入分布的不同分位数的性别差距中的作用。使用意大利的关联雇主-雇员数据集，我们发现存在不同性别的公司特定溢价，并解释了1995-2015年期间平均30%的性别薪酬差距。我们分解差距溢价到排序的妇女跨公司和公司内的议价能力的差异，通过一个标准的布林德瓦哈卡分解。我们发现，排序解释了一个更大的比例的性别工资差距比讨价还价的平均水平和底部的分布，而讨价还价占主导地位的顶部。这与我们在不同职业中的发现是一致的：分类解释了蓝领和白领工人的性别工资差距的很大一部分，而讨价还价则占了管理者的主导地位。分类和讨价还价这两种渠道在解释工人职业生涯早期阶段的薪酬性别差异方面具有相似的权重，但对于年龄较大的群体来说，分类占主导地位。另一方面，讨价还价的重要性随着时间的推移而增加。我们在四个重叠的时间间隔内重复我们的分解练习，发现虽然排序是1995-2000年公司对性别薪酬差距贡献的唯一驱动力，但讨价还价解释了2010-2015年公司对排序的贡献。我们解释了在意大利劳动力市场的演变，（一）有利于增加女性劳动力的参与，（二）引入分散的工资设置机制的结果，在谈判的重要性上升。我们建议分类的结果，性别差异的流动率，并提供证据表明，妇女有一个较低的概率移动到公司更高的溢价。我们发现，这种差距的概率移动到更高的溢价公司是高技能的女性更大，但较小的女性从高风险的公司，在那里我们定义的风险公司的基础上，他们的工资的标准差。最后，我们利用了一个关于公司董事会性别构成的自然实验，没有发现任何证据表明董事会中女性人数的增加会减少男性和女性之间谈判能力的差异。本文是基于与博科尼大学的Alessandra Casarico的联合工作。

This paper investigates the role of firms in determining the gender gap in earnings on average and at different quantiles of the earnings distribution. Using a linked employer-employee dataset for Italy, we show the existence of firm-specific premia which differ across gender and explain on average 30% of the gender pay gap in the period 1995-2015. We decompose the gap in premia into sorting of women across firms and differences in bargaining power within firms by means of a standard Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. We find that sorting explains a larger fraction of the gender pay gap than bargaining on average and at the bottom of the distribution, whereas bargaining dominates at the top. This is consistent with what we find across different occupations: sorting explains a larger fraction of the gender pay gap for blue- and white-collar workers, whereas bargaining dominates for managers. The two channels of sorting and bargaining have similar weight in explaining gender differences in pay in the early stages of workers' careers, but for older cohorts sorting dominates. On the other hand, bargaining has increased in importance over time. We replicate our decomposition exercise in four overlapping intervals and find that while sorting is the only driving force of the firm contribution to the gender pay gap in 1995-2000, bargaining explains as much of the firm contribution as sorting in 2010-2015. We explain the rise in importance of bargaining as the result of an evolution in the Italian labour market that (i) favoured an increase in female labour force participation, (ii) introduced mechanisms of decentralised wage setting. We propose sorting as the outcome of gender differences in mobility rates and provide evidence that women have a lower probability of moving towards firms with higher premia. We show that this gap in the probability of moving to higher premia firms is larger for high-skilled women, but smaller for women moving from high to low risk firms, where we defined riskiness of firms based on the standard deviation of their wages. Finally, we exploit a natural experiment on the gender composition of corporate boards and find no evidence that an increase in female presence in boards reduces differences in bargaining power between men and women.*This paper is based on joint work with Alessandra Casarico, Bocconi University.