Journal Article

Job mobility and the gender wage gap in Italy

Authors

Publication date

05 Jan 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

18 , 130 -142

DOI

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

ISSN

16

Subjects

Labour Economics and Wages And Earnings

Links

http://serlib0.essex.ac.uk/record=b1650556~S5

Notes

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

Related publications

1. Is it the way she moves? New evidence on the gender wage growth gap in the early careers

   Emilia Del Bono and Daniela Vuri

   ISER Working Paper Series, 2006-59 - 31 Dec 2006 - download  

2. Job Mobility and the Gender Wage Gap in Italy

   Emilia Del Bono and Daniela Vuri

   Conference Paper, European Society for Population Economics Conference - 23 Jun 2006

3. Job Mobility and the Gender Wage Gap in Italy

   Emilia Del Bono and Daniela Vuri

   Conference Paper, Joint Empirical Social Science Seminar - 07 Jun 2006

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