The gender wage gap and the role of policy: Analyzing patterns over time, over the life cycle and across the wage distribution

性别工资差距是一个持续和普遍的现象，它对一个社会有很强的影响，因为它是一个国家不平等的主要驱动因素。因此，有一场活跃的公众辩论和重要的学术文献描述和量化了性别工资差距，分析了这种差距的原因，并讨论了可能的政策改革，以减少性别工资差距。在这个研究项目中，我们的目标是扩展这些文献，并在几个方面为政策辩论做出贡献。首先，我们将重点关注德国过去几十年性别工资差距的演变。其次，我们关注生命周期中的性别工资差距，以及它与孩子的存在之间的关系。最后，我们将分析家庭政策如何影响母亲的工资和性别工资差距作为一个整体。这个项目的一个中心焦点是异质性：在四个不同的项目中，我们不仅要分析人口平均工资差距，还要分析整个工资分布和特定兴趣子群体的性别工资差距。在项目1中，我们关注的是性别差距随时间的演变。到目前为止，绝大多数文献分析的是人口平均性别工资差距。虽然这一证据对政策辩论至关重要，但平均效应可能掩盖了工资分配方面的重要异质性效应。在关注性别工资差距随时间的演变时，这一点尤为重要，因为在包括德国在内的许多国家，工资不平等一直在加剧。因此，在本研究项目的第一部分中，我们将使用行政数据来详细分析德国在控制选择进入就业的完全收入分配的情况下性别工资差距的演变。在项目2中，我们分析了整个生命周期中的性别工资差距。以前的文献已经证明，性别工资差距与孩子的存在密切相关。我们还想关注孩子对性别工资差距的影响，但不仅是样本均值，而且基于行政数据，我们还将分析孩子的影响是否以及如何随着工资分布而变化。最后，我们在这个项目中讨论了政策如何影响性别差距。对于政策评估，我们将使用利用外生区域变化和动态结构生命周期模型的简化形式证据。先前的文献表明，工作中断，特别是母亲的长时间职业中断，对未来的收入前景有负面影响。我们将把重点放在减少劳动力市场摩擦或工作成本（如提供儿童保育）或增加对妇女工作激励的政策上。

The gender wage gap is a persistent and pervasive phenomenon observable It has strong implications for a society since it is one main driver of inequality in a country. Therefore, there exists an active public debate and an important academic literature that describes and quantifies the gender wage gap, analyses the reasons for this gap and discusses potential policy reforms to reduce the gender wage gap. In this research project, we aim to extend this literature and to contribute to the policy debate in several dimensions. First, we will focus on the evolution of the gender wage gap in Germany over the last decades. Second, we focus on the gender wage gap over the lifecycle and how it is related to the presence of children. Finally, we will analyze how family policy affects the wages of mothers and the gender wage gap as a whole. One central focus of this project is on heterogeneity: in four different projects, we will analyze the gender wage gap not only for the population mean but for the whole wage distribution and for sub groups of specific interest.In Project 1, we focus on the evolution of the gender gap over time. So far, the vast majority of the literature analyzes the gender wage gap for the population mean. While this evidence is of central importance for the policy debate, the average effects might disguise important heterogeneous effects over the wage distributions. This is particularly important when focusing on the evolution of the gender wage gap over time since wage inequality has been increasing in many countries including Germany. Therefore, in the first part of this research project we will use administrative data to provide a detailed analysis of the evolution of the gender wage gap in Germany over the full income distribution controlling for selection into employment. In Project 2, we analyze the gender wage gap over the lifecycle. Previous literature has documented that the gender wage gap is strongly related to the presence of children. We also want to focus on the effect of children on the gender wage gap, however not only for the sample mean but based on administrative data we will also analyze if and how the effect of children varies over the wage distribution.Finally, we discuss in this project how policy can influence the gender gap. For the policy evaluation we will use reduced form evidence exploiting exogenous regional variation and a dynamic structural life cycle model. Previous literature has shown that employment interruptions, particularly long career breaks of mothers, have negative consequences on future earnings perspectives. We will concentrate on policies which reduce labor market frictions or costs of work such as the provision of child care or which increase working incentives for women.