Student Faculty Macro Lunch: “Does the Gender Composition of an Occupation Affect its Compensation?”, and it is joint work with Alexandra Spitz-Oener

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Submitted by Brandon Eltiste on June 06, 2022
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597 Evans Hall
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Tuesday, December 6, 2022 - 12:00
About this Event

Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, Professor, Goethe University Frankfurt

Abstract: We analyze whether an increase in the female share of an occupation causally leads to lower relative wages in that occupation. The literature has documented a negative correlation between the female share and relative wages on the occupation level in different countries and time period, but causal evidence has so far been missing. We exploit the natural experiment of German reunification as an exogenous shock to female occupational shares. Before reunification, East German women were not only more likely to participate in the labor market than their West German counterparts, but female occupational shares also differed substantially between East and West. Using the share of women among East German potential migrants in an occupation-age cell as an instrument for the actual female share in the West after reunification, we document that an increase in the female share in an occupation causally leads to lower wages in that occupation. This evidence is in line with the “devaluation hypothesis” developed in the sociological literature.