IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed011/574.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Evolution of Gender Differences in Occupational Mobility and Wages

Author

Listed:
  • Kerem Cosar

    (University of Chicago Booth School of Business)

  • Sekyu Choi

    (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)

Abstract

The U.S. gender wage gap shrank steadily during the last quarter of the past century. Concurrently, the occupational composition of women converged to that of men as they left the home-sector, entered previously male dominated professional and managerial occupations, and started switching occupations as frequently as their male colleagues. Previous work has associated these gender-related labor market trends with either technological or institutional changes but did not decompose the outcomes in a unified general equilibrium setting. This paper attempts to do that. Our contribution is twofold. First, we structurally estimate gender-specific occupational entry and mobility cost parameters using Current Population Survey data. We find that the cost of switching to professional and managerial occupations relative to clerical occupations is 42% to 67% higher for women than it is for men. We also find a declining gap over time. Second, we simulate the estimated model to address the following question: what is the fraction of the reduced gender wage gap that can be attributed to the decreased mobility costs for women, and to shifts in the occupational wage structure?

Suggested Citation

  • Kerem Cosar & Sekyu Choi, 2011. "Evolution of Gender Differences in Occupational Mobility and Wages," 2011 Meeting Papers 574, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed011:574
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://economicdynamics.org/meetpapers/2011/paper_574.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jeremy Greenwood & Ananth Seshadri, 2004. "Engines of Liberation - Additional Notes," RCER Working Papers 506, University of Rochester - Center for Economic Research (RCER).
    2. Michelle Petersen Rendall, 2010. "Brain versus brawn: the realization of women's comparative advantage," IEW - Working Papers 491, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich, revised Jun 2017.
    3. Gueorgui Kambourov & Iourii Manovskii, 2008. "Rising Occupational And Industry Mobility In The United States: 1968-97," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 49(1), pages 41-79, February.
    4. Erhan Artuç & Shubham Chaudhuri & John McLaren, 2010. "Trade Shocks and Labor Adjustment: A Structural Empirical Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(3), pages 1008-1045, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:red:sed011:574. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Christian Zimmermann). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.