substantially revised version published in: Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2017, 136, 161-173.
This paper focuses on re-examining the gender wage gap and the potential role that reservation wages play. Based on two waves of rich data from the IZA Evaluation Dataset Survey we examine the importance of gender differences in reservation wages to explain the gender gap in realized wages for a sample of newly unemployed individuals actively searching for a full-time job in Germany. The dataset includes measures for education, socio-demographics, labor market history, psychological factors and job search characteristics allowing us to perform a decomposition analysis including these potentially influential factors.
Our results suggest that the gender wage gap disappears once we control for reservation wages. We also find a close correspondence between the two gaps for certain subgroups. For example, those with low labor market experience show no gender gap in reservation wages and also no corresponding gap in observed wages. In an attempt to better understand how the initial gender gap in reservation wages arises, we also decompose the gender gap in reservation wages and draw some preliminary conclusions on the nature of the unobservable traits that reservation wages might be capturing.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.