Essays in Empirical Labour Economics
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis analyses the role of workplace heterogeneity in determining pay differentials between workers, employing a range of reduced-form tools and using detailed matched employer-employee administrative data. The first chapter, co-authored with Alessandra Casarico, studies the contribution of differences in firm pay policy to the gender wage gap in Italy, decomposing them into a between-firm component of sorting of women in low-pay firms and a within-firm component related to differences in bargaining power between gender. Building on Card et al. (2016), we investigate the contribution of firms to the gender gap in earnings at different deciles of the earnings distribution, by age and cohort, and over time. Using a linked employer-employee dataset for Italy, covering the universe of workers in the private sector, we show that the gap in firm pay policy explains on average 30 percent of the gender pay gap in the period 1995-2015. When we decompose differences in firm pay policy into sorting and bargaining, we find that sorting of women in low pay firms dominates on average and at the bottom of the distribution, whereas bargaining prevails at the top and has increased in importance over time. We explore gendered mobility patterns towards firms with more generous pay policy as a driver of sorting and exploit exogenous variation in the gender composition of board of directors to study the impact of firm environment on gender differences in bargaining power. We find that women are less likely to move towards more generous firms, especially in the event of firm closures, and that exogenous changes in the gender balance in leadership positions reduce the gender gap in bargaining power, indicating that the latter is partly malleable to institutional changes. The second chapter, co-authored with Long Hong, studies the contribution of coworkers on future wage growth. Using linked employer-employee data for the Veneto region in Italy, we explore coworkers' effect on wage g…
abstract: This thesis analyses the role of workplace heterogeneity in determining pay differentials between workers, employing a range of reduced-form tools and using detailed matched employer-employee administrative data. The first chapter, co-authored with Alessandra Casarico, studies the contribution of differences in firm pay policy to the gender wage gap in Italy, decomposing them into a between-firm component of sorting of women in low-pay firms and a within-firm component related to differences in bargaining power between gender. Building on Card et al. (2016), we investigate the contribution of firms to the gender gap in earnings at different deciles of the earnings distribution, by age and cohort, and over time. Using a linked employer-employee dataset for Italy, covering the universe of workers in the private sector, we show that the gap in firm pay policy explains on average 30 percent of the gender pay gap in the period 1995-2015. When we decompose differences in firm pay policy into sorting and bargaining, we find that sorting of women in low pay firms dominates on average and at the bottom of the distribution, whereas bargaining prevails at the top and has increased in importance over time. We explore gendered mobility patterns towards firms with more generous pay policy as a driver of sorting and exploit exogenous variation in the gender composition of board of directors to study the impact of firm environment on gender differences in bargaining power. We find that women are less likely to move towards more generous firms, especially in the event of firm closures, and that exogenous changes in the gender balance in leadership positions reduce the gender gap in bargaining power, indicating that the latter is partly malleable to institutional changes. The second chapter, co-authored with Long Hong, studies the contribution of coworkers on future wage growth. Using linked employer-employee data for the Veneto region in Italy, we explore coworkers' effect on wage g…
author: Lattanzio, Salvatore
language: eng
keywords: Gender wage gap, Peers, Automation, Inequality, Matched employer-employee data
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/6a679a5e-d37b-4aa0-95de-cf4ed77c4df8/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2021-04-28
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:30Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.72873