Should low-wage workers care about where they work? Assessing the impact of employer characteristics on low-wage mobility

This paper studies the importance of employer-specific determinants in escaping low earnings in Germany. To address the initial conditions problem and the endogeneity of employer retention, we model (intra-firm) low-pay transitions using a multivariate Probit model that accounts for selection into low-wage employment and non-random employer drop-out. Using data from the LIAB Linked Employer-Employee panel, our results indicate that for male workers from the service sector the probability of escaping low-pay increases with employer size. This contrasts with female workers from the service sector, who rather benefit from collective bargaining coverage and local works councils. These findings are consistent with internal labour markets being an important ingredient of male within-firm wage growth, whereas the removal of asymmetric information appears to be more relevant in explaining female workers' wage transitions. --wage mobility,trivariate probit,linked employer-employee data

Gender Earnings Gap in German Firms: The Impact of Firm Characteristics and Institutions

Most existing analyses on the gender wage gap (GWG) have neglected the establishment as a place where inequality between male and female employees arises and is maintained. The use of linked employee-employer data permits us to move beyond the individual and consider the importance of the workplace to explain gender pay differentials. That is, we first provide a comprehensive study on the effects of various firm characteristics and the institutional framework on the GWG in Germany. The innovation of our research is that we do not just compare average male and female wages (of specific groups of employees), but look at within-firm gender wage differentials. Our results indicate that the mean GWG within firms is smaller than the average overall GWG. Furthermore, we can show that firms with formalized co-determination (works council) and those covered by collective wage agreements are more likely to have smaller GWG. It is also interesting to note that the wage differential between men and women decreases with firm size and increases with the wage level. --gender wage gap,unions,works councils,discrimination,within-firms wage differentials

Deregulating Job Placement in Europe: A Microeconometric Evaluation of an Innovative Voucher Scheme in Germany

Job placement vouchers can be regarded as a tool to spur competition between public and private job placement activities. The German government launched this instrument in order to end the public placement monopoly and to subsidize its private competitors. We exploit very rich administrative data provided for the first time by the Federal Employment Agency and apply propensity score matching as a method to solve the fundamental evaluation problem and to estimate the effect of the vouchers. We find positive treatment effects on the employment probability after one year of 6.5 percentage points in Western Germany and give a measure for deadweight loss. --Job Placement,Active Labor Market Policy,Matching

Is there a wage premium or wage discount for flexible hours?

With flexible work time arrangements firms can quickly adjust to demand fluctuations, while employees may benefit from more time sovereignty. Depending on the specific type of arrangement the accompanying wage effects are ambiguous and have rarely been analyzed. According to the theory of compensating wage differentials, workers with more time sovereignty may be willing to forego earnings whereas others need to be compensated by higher earnings. We analyze the wage effects of work time accounts using GSOEP data from 2002. We compare wages of employees with and without work time accounts by propensity score matching. Our results indicate that work time accountees receive higher wages on average, thus suggesting an employer's discretion to determine the timing of flexible work hours, but with remarkable differences across sectors. --work time flexibility, propensity score matching, compensating wage differentials

Earnings of Men and Women in Firms with a Female Dominated Workforce: What Drives the Impact of Sex Segregation on Wages?

This study analyzes the relationship between the segregation of women across establishments and the salaries paid to men and women. My aim is to separate the impact the proportion of women working within an establishment has upon individual wages. For this purpose hypotheses are formulated as to what drives this impact: sex-specific preferences, lower qualifications among women or discrimination against women. To investigate this issue empirically, I use matched employer-employee data from Germany. My results indicate that an increasing proportion of women in an establishment reduces wages for males and females in both western and eastern Germany. Furthermore the empirical analysis shows that by successively including worker and establishment characteristics, the number of females in an establishment has a severely detrimental effect upon the salaries paid to both sexes. --gender wage differentials,female segregation across establishments,matched employer-employee data

Escaping low-earnings in Germany - do employer characteristics make a difference?

This paper studies the importance of employer-specific determinants in escaping low earnings in Germany. To address the initial conditions problem and the endogeneity of employer retention, we model (intra-firm) low-pay transitions using a multivariate Probit model that accounts for selection into low-wage employment and non-random employer drop-out. Using data from the LIAB Linked Employer-Employee panel, our results for the service sector indicate that for male workers the probability of escaping low-pay increases with employer size. This contrasts with female workers, who rather benefit from collective bargaining coverage and local works councils. These findings are consistent with internal labour markets being an important ingredient of male within-firm wage growth, whereas the removal of asymmetric information appears to be more relevant in explaining female workers' wage transitions

Gender Earnings Gap in German Firms : The Impact of Firm Characteristics and Institutions

Most existing analyses on the gender wage gap (GWG) have neglected the establishment as a place where inequality between male and female employees arises and is maintained. The use of linked employee-employer data permits us to move beyond the individual and consider the importance of the workplace to explain gender pay differentials. That is, we first provide a comprehensive study on the effects of various firm characteristics and the institutional framework on the GWG in Germany. The innovation of our research is that we do not just compare average male and female wages (of specific groups of employees), but look at within-firm gender wage differentials. Our results indicate that the mean GWG within firms is smaller than the average overall GWG. Furthermore, we can show that firms with formalized co-determination (works council) and those covered by collective wage agreements are more likely to have smaller GWG. It is also interesting to note that the wage differential between men and women decreases with firm size and increases with the wage level

How to limit discrimination? Analyzing the effects of innovative workplace practices on intra-firm gender wage gaps using linked employer-employee data

This paper provides a new approach to assess the impact of organisational changes fostering employee involvement, performance related pay schemes and other relevant trends in personnel policy on the gender wage gap. Our results indicate that innovative human resource practices tend to limit the wage differential between men and women. The innovation of this study is that we use linked employer-employee data to look at within-firm gender wage differentials. To investigate the theoretical hypotheses regarding the effect of selected human resource measures on gender wage inequality, we calculate a firm-specific gender wage gap accounting for differences in individual characteristics

Measuring Selectivity-Corrected Gender Wage Gaps in the EU

We investigate different techniques to assess the gender pay gap in five EU countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom), focusing on self-selection into market work. Results show that selectivity correction has an impact on both wage estimates and wage gap decomposition. If there is a positive correlation between the wage and the propensity to participate, the estimated pay gap understates the true difference in earnings when self-selection is ignored. The estimated pay gap differs considerably at different quantiles of the wage distribution, and is sensitive to the choice of estimator. --

Entwicklung der beruflichen Segregation von Männern und Frauen zwischen 1996 und 2005: eine Bestandsaufnahme auf betrieblicher Ebene

Based on the Linked-Employer-Employee data from the IAB (LIAB) we show how the horizontal occupational segregation of men and women in German establishments developed between 1996 and 2005. For this purpose we apply the dissimilarity index and the standardized dissimilarity index at the establishment level. The analysis of the heterogeneity of firm-specific segregation is differentiated by region and sector. In spite of the small overall decrease in segregation over time, large differences between establishments are revealed. Both the female share and the share of part-time employees are considerably larger in less segregated establishments. The latter also tend to employ more highly educated workers and, in eastern Germany, a larger share of unskilled workers. A decomposition of the change in labour market segregation over time reveals that the small decrease in the dissimilarity index is mainly driven by an overall shift towards less segregated occupations. Based solely on the change in the gender ratio by occupation, the dissimilarity index in eastern Germany would even have increased