中国经济转型对性别工资差异的影响-EditorialExpress.docVIP

The Impact of China’s Economic Transition on Gender Earnings Gap An analysis based on firm effects Liying Li Henan University of Finance and Economics, Zhengzhou, China Xiaoyuan Dong University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Canada Abstract China’s economic reforms and opening to the world market has drawn considerable attention to the gender wage gap and the role of discrimination as an underlying determinant. However, almost all the existing analyses rely on individual-level data and neglect the role of the firm--the very place where the gender wage disparity arises. In this paper, we analyze the impacts of transition on the gender wage differential using a unique employer-employee matched dataset. The dataset consists of 3,200 employees selected randomly from 163 enterprises in Nanjing city for the period from 1994 to 2001. The sample enterprises were originally owned by governments at various levels ranging from provincial to township and underwent ownership rights reforms in the late 1990s. Using the rich information we explore what role firms have as a determinant of the gender wage gap in these reformed public enterprises. Our data show that the gender wage gap in the sample enterprises was small but has increased over the period of investigation and that much of the wage variation was attributable to firm fixed effects (54 to 74 percent for male workers and 54 to 82 percent for female workers). To investigate the interaction of firm characteristics and the gender earnings gap, the hierarchical linear modeling approach is adopted. We examine how firm attributes such as market power, labor compensation methods, industrial democracy, and occupation segregation may affect the gender pay gap. Our results show that firms under stronger competition pressure tend to have a larger gender earnings gap and that the gender pay gap is wider in firms in which compensation methods are more closely linked to individual performance. These findings suggest that rising ma