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The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 90 No. 2 2008

Matching as a Tool to Decompose Wage Gaps

Hugo Ñopo

Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology that uses matching comparisons to explain gender wage differences. The approach emphasizes gender differences in the supports of the distributions of observable characteristics and provides insights into the distribution of unexplained gender pay differences. This nonparametric alternative to the Blinder-Oaxaca (BO) decomposition does not require the estimation of earnings equations and divides the gap into four additive elements. Two of these are analogous to the elements of the BO decomposition (but computed only over the common support of the distributions of characteristics), while the other two account for differences in the supports.

DOI
10.1162/rest.90.2.290
Volume
90
Issue
2
Pages
290-299
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref

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