Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/35402 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 3978
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
In this paper we analyze the trend of the gender gap between wives and husbands for Mediterranean countries with a strong family tradition, using data from the European Household Panel (ECHP) of 2001 and the European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) of 2006. In general, wives and husbands, when married, have the same characteristics but wives suffer from two types of discrimination with respect to husbands: a lower wage for the same work and a primary responsibility for children. This paper uses quantile regression and counterfactual decomposition methods to investigate whether a glass ceiling exists or if instead a sticky floor is more prevalent among European families over time (2001 and 2006). We correct for selectivity the unconditional wage distribution of married women and we show that the wage gap decomposition is different if we ignore self-selection. We find that the wage gap is positive in each country, and the greater part of it is composed of a discrimination effect, while the characteristics effect is small. In Mediterranean countries, wives suffer from the sticky floor effect, i.e. the gender gap is bigger at the bottom of distribution, while we can observe that the glass ceiling effect decreased in most countries in 2006.
Subjects: 
Gender pay gap
selection
quantile regression
counterfactual decomposition
JEL: 
J16
J31
C2
C3
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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