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Job Mobility and the Gender Wage Gap in Italy

Abstract

This paper investigates the way in which job mobility contributes to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that men experience higher wage growth than women during the first 10 years of their career, and that this difference is particularly large when workers move across firms. This gender mobility penalty 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. Exploring the wage growth of job movers, we find that a significant gender wage penalty emerges when workers move to larger firms. This might be explained by the fact that bigger establishments offer jobs more highly valued by women than men or that the relationship between job satisfaction and firm size is less negative for women than men. Using data on job satisfaction, we find evidence for the latter hypothesis as well as some indication that wages and fringe benefits compensate for lower levels of job satisfaction in larger firms, but that this is so only for men.

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Paper provided by Tor Vergata University, CEIS in its series CEIS Research Paper with number 130.

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Length: 40 pages
Date of creation: 06 Nov 2008
Date of revision: 06 Nov 2008
Handle: RePEc:rtv:ceisrp:130
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CEIS - Centre for Economic and International Studies - Faculty of Economics - University of Rome "Tor Vergata" - Via Columbia, 2 00133 Roma

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Keywords: panel data; job mobility; gender gap; wage growth; job satisfaction;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models
  • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
  • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
  • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
  • J28 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Safety; Job Satisfaction; Related Public Policy

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