Labor market shocks knock women's wages down

Labor market shocks knock women's wages down

Researching the consequences of transition cannot be done better than at the IOS in Regensburg, after all, this is the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies. We came to present our study on the effects of rapid and massive labor reallocation on gender wage inequality. We use our massive data on wages around the region of transition countries and use the previously unknown data about the labor market flows. All in all, we find that episodes of massive separations (in particular in manufacturing sector and in state owned enterprises) are followed by increases in gender wage gaps even once we account for differences in workers characteristics. The effects are quite sizable, reaching 2-4 percentage points on average. The study is available as GRAPE Working Paper.