The gender wage gap and wage arrears in Russia: Evidence from the RLMS

Abstract.This paper re-examines the gender wage gap in Russia between 1994 and 1998 taking into account the pervasiveness of Russia’s non-payment institutions. Using censored regression techniques we investigate wage discrimination at different sections of the income distribution and for various important sub-groups. We find that the wage gap is distributed unevenly. Most notably, women at the lower end of the income distribution suffer the highest degree of discrimination. However, we find that wage arrears and payment in-kind attenuated wage discrimination, particularly amongst the lowest paid workers, suggesting that Russian enterprise managers assigned importance to equity considerations when allocating these forms of non-payment.

[1]  Constantin Ogloblin,et al.  The Gender Earnings Differential in the Russian Transition Economy , 1999 .

[2]  Anthony B. Atkinson,et al.  Economic Transformation in Eastern Europe and the Distribution of Income , 1994 .

[3]  P. Schmidt,et al.  Limited-Dependent and Qualitative Variables in Econometrics. , 1984 .

[4]  S. Jenkins.  Earnings discrimination measurement: A distributional approach , 1994 .

[5]  Loránd Ambrus-Lakatos,et al.  Mediating the transition : labour markets in Central and Eastern Europe , 1998 .

[6]  A. L. Scott,et al.  Wage Arrears and the Distribution of Earnings in Russia , 2001 .

[7]  Robert E. Wright,et al.  Gender Discrimination in the British Labour Market: A Reassessment , 1991 .

[8]  Francine D. Blau,et al.  Wage Structure and Gender Earnings Differentials: an International Comparison , 1996 .

[9]  A. Mcauley.  Women's Work and Wages in the Soviet Union , 2022 .

[10]  A. Pailhé.  Gender Discrimination in Central Europe during the Systemic Transition , 2000 .

[11]  R. Oaxaca,et al.  Searching for the effect of unionism on the wages of union and nonunion workers , 1988 .

[12]  J. Cotton,et al.  On the Decomposition of Wage Differentials , 2014 .

[13]  G. Arabsheibani,et al.  ‘Mind the Gap’: An Analysis of Gender Wage Differentials in Russia , 1999 .

[14]  T. Mroz,et al.  The gender gap in wages in Russia from 1992 to 1995 , 2000 .

[15]  J. Hansen,et al.  Endogenous schooling and the distribution of the gender wage gap , 1999, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[16]  Alessandro Acquisti,et al.  Grime and Punishment: Job Insecurity and Wage Arrears in the Russian Federation , 1999, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[17]  A. Bergson.  Income Inequality under Soviet Socialism , 1984 .

[18]  J. Wadsworth,et al.  Wage Arrears and the Distribution of Earnings in Russia , 2001 .

[19]  B. Reilly.  The gender pay gap in Russia during the transition, 1992‐96 , 1999 .

[20]  Harry Anthony Patrinos,et al.  Labour market discrimination against indigenous people in Peru , 1995 .

[21]  R. Oaxaca,et al.  Swimming Upstream, Floating Downstream: Trends in the U.S. And Danish Gender Wage Gaps , 2001 .

[22]  T. Idson,et al.  To Pay or Not to Pay: Managerial Decision Making and Wage Withholding in Russia , 1998 .

[23]  G. Friebel,et al.  Why Russian Workers Do Not Move: Attachment of Workers Through In-Kind Payments , 2000 .

[24]  Bertram Silverman,et al.  New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism , 1996 .

[25]  Peter F. Orazem,et al.  Winners and Losers in Transition: Returns to Education, Experience, and Gender in Slovenia , 1994 .

[26]  Milan Vodopivec,et al.  Male-female differences in labor market outcomes during the early transition to market: The cases of Estonia and Slovenia , 1999 .

[27]  J. Heckman.  Sample selection bias as a specification error , 1979 .

[28]  T. Mickiewicz.  Work without wages:Russia's nonpayment crisis , 2002 .

[29]  Seth Pettie,et al.  Mind the gap , 2006, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

[30]  David Neumark,et al.  Employers' Discriminatory Behavior and the Estimation of Wage Discrimination , 1987 .

[31]  Andrew Newell,et al.  The Gender Pay Gap in the Transition from Communism: Some Empirical Evidence , 2001, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[32]  Ronald L. Oaxaca,et al.  Identification in Detailed Wage Decompositions , 1999, Review of Economics and Statistics.

[33]  P. Desai.  Work Without Wages: Russia's Non-Payment Crisis , 2000 .

[34]  E. Brainerd.  Women in Transition: Changes in Gender Wage Differentials in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union , 2000 .

[35]  Kevin M. Murphy,et al.  Wage Inequality and the Rise in Returns to Skill , 1993, Journal of Political Economy.

[36]  R. Oaxaca.  Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets , 1973 .

[37]  Wing Suen.  Decomposing Wage Residuals: Unmeasured Skill or Statistical Artifact? , 1997, Journal of Labor Economics.

[38]  A. Blinder.  Wage Discrimination: Reduced Form and Structural Estimates , 1973 .

[39]  E. Brainerd.  Winners and Losers in Russia's Economic Transition , 1998 .