ABSTRACT
This note explores the presence of a gender pay gap in Venezuela. Using household surveys between 1985 and 2015, I test for gender disparity on wages in the formal sector. Firstly, I use a dummy variable technique in Ordinary Least Squares regression and quantile regressions. Secondly, I apply a two-fold decomposition approach following Blinder-Oaxaca, Cotton, and pooled model assumptions. Finally, I decompose the differences in distribution using quantile regressions. The main finding suggests a significant gender pay gap. On average, women earn about 21% less than men, and this inequality is more evident in 2015 for low quantiles.
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Notes
1 For background, Bishu and Alkadry (Citation2017) review 98 journal articles on this topic.
2 Bando (Citation2019) is a recent effort to identify individual, societal, technological, and institutional factors that might have influenced the gender pay inequality over the last ten years in Latin America.
3 See Appendix for details about the methodologies.
4 Given changes in the survey’s dictionary, as in 1994, a harmonized process was performed.
5 Looking for robustness, I run the regressions under different combinations of covariates, reaching similar results. Table 2 shows the complete form.
6 Standard errors were computed by bootstrapping the results 100 times.