Job mobility and the gender wage gap in Italy

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

January 5, 2011

Summary:

This paper investigates the contribution of gender differences in job mobility to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that over the first 10 years of labour market experience job mobility accounts for up to 30% of total log wage growth for men and only 8.3% for women, and that this difference is mainly due to differences in returns to mobility. The gender mobility gap is robust to the inclusion of individual, job and firm characteristics, to different ways of accounting for individual unobserved heterogeneity, and is mainly found for voluntary job moves. Looking at the characteristics of the jobs and the firms' workers move to, we find that moves to larger firms represent by far the main source of gender differences in returns to mobility. We offer two possible explanations for this finding; one which involves differences in bargaining behaviour and one which relates to the theory of compensating differentials.

Published in

Labour Economics

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 18 , p.130 -142

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2010.06.002

ISSN

9275371

Subjects

Notes

Albert Sloman Library Periodicals *restricted to Univ. Essex registered users*


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