Browsing by Person "Castagnetti, Carolina"

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The convergence of the gender pay gap : an alternative estimation approach
(2017) Töpfer, Marina; Castagnetti, Carolina; Rosti, Luisa
So far, little work has been done on directly estimating differences of wage gaps. Studies estimating pay differentials, generally compare them across different subsamples. This comparison does not allow to conduct any inference or, in the case of decompositions, to confront the respective decomposition components across subsamples. We propose an exten- sion of an Oaxaca-Blinder type decomposition based on the omitted variable bias formula to directly estimate the change in pay gaps across subsamples. The method proposed can be made robust to the index-number problem of the standard Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and to the indeterminacy problem of the intercept-shift approach. Using Italian micro data, we estimate the difference in the gender pay gap across time (2005 and 2014). By applying our proposed decomposition, we find that the convergence of the gender pay gap over time is only driven by the catching-up of women in terms of observable characteristics, while the impact of anti-discrimination legislation is found to be negligible.
The reversal of the gender pay gap among public-contestselected young employees
(2015) Töpfer, Marina; Castagnetti, Carolina; Rosti, Luisa
This paper analyzes the effect of public-contest recruitment on earnings by applying an extended version of the Oaxaca-Blinder model with double selection to microdata on Italy. We find that the gender pay gap vanishes among public-contest selected employees, and even reverses in favor of women (-17.4%) in the young sample. The reversal is because public contests are merit-based and gender-fair screening devices. They are merit-based because selected employees possess higher productive characteristics than unselected ones, both women and men. They are gender-fair because the coefficients component in the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition is never significant among public-contest recruited employees, either with or without selection. On the contrary, among employees not hired by public contest the gender pay gap is positive and significant (7.6%), and it is entirely due to coefficients, that is to discrimination in the career path.