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

本文考察了企业在决定平均收入和不同收入分配分位数上的性别差距方面的作用。使用意大利的关联雇主-雇员数据集，我们显示了不同性别的公司特定溢价的存在，并解释了1995-2015年间平均30%的性别薪酬差距。我们通过标准的Blinder-Oaxaca分解将保费差距分解为公司间女性的分类和公司内部讨价还价能力的差异。我们发现，与平均和底层的讨价还价相比，排序可以解释更大比例的性别薪酬差距，而讨价还价在顶层占主导地位。这与我们在不同职业中发现的情况是一致的：分类解释了蓝领和白领的性别薪酬差距的更大比例，而讨价还价对经理来说占主导地位。分类和讨价还价这两个渠道在解释工人职业生涯早期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。我们在四个重叠的区间重复我们的分解过程，发现尽管分类是1995-2000年公司对性别薪酬差距贡献的唯一驱动力，但讨价还价对2010-2015年的公司贡献的解释与分类一样多。我们解释了讨价还价重要性上升的原因是，意大利劳动力市场的演变(I)有利于增加女性劳动力参与率，(Ii)引入了分散设定工资的机制。我们建议将分类作为流动性比率性别差异的结果，并提供证据表明，女性转向溢价较高的公司的可能性较低。我们表明，对于高技能女性来说，跳槽到更高保费公司的可能性差距更大，但对于从高风险公司跳槽到低风险公司的女性来说，差距更小，我们根据公司工资的标准差来定义公司的风险。最后，我们利用了一项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比例的增加会减少男性和女性之间讨价还价能力的差异。*本文基于与博科尼大学亚历山德拉·卡萨里科的联合研究。

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.