Job Search, Job amenities, and the Gender Pay Gap

• Department of Economics

In this seminar, Andreas Mueller will present the paper 'Job Search, Job Amenities, and the Gender Pay Gap'

This paper studies gender gaps in labour-market outcomes, with a focus on job ladder dynamics. It shows that women experience substantially lower wage growth conditional on prior wages despite nearly identical job-to-job transition rates for men and women. To reconcile these observations, the research documents gender differences in the valuation of nonwage job amenities and in job search behaviour and develops a multi-dimensional job-ladder model with endogenous search effort where workers value both wages and amenities. The model allows for gender heterogeneity in separation rates, search effort, the value of nonemployment, amenity valuations, and bargaining power, enabling a joint analysis of gender wage and employment gaps.

A quantitative decomposition shows that differences in preferences for nonwage amenities account for nearly 40% of the gender pay gap. Differences in the value of nonemployment and bargaining power explain most of the remainder, with only a limited role for differences in separation rates and search behaviour.

Finally, it is found that increases in job amenities—such as the expansion of remote work—raise the gender wage gap while reducing gender differences in employment.

Co-authors: Jason Faberman and Aysegul Sahin