Export, Female Comparative Advantage and the Gender Wage Gap

Alessandra Bonfiglioli () and Federica de Pace
Additional contact information
Federica de Pace: OECD

No 925, Working Papers from Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of firms' export activity on the gender wage gap among its workers. Using matched employer-employee data from Germany for the period between 1993 and 2007, we show that an increase in a firm's export widens the wage gap between male and female blue-collar workers, while it reduces it between male and female white collars. In particular, the former effect is stronger for workers in routine manual tasks, while the latter is driven by employees performing interactive tasks. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that serving foreign markets relies more on interpersonal skills, which reinforces female comparative advantage and reduces (widens) the gender wage gap in white-collar (blue-collar) occupations. Our results, identified out of the variation in wages within firm-worker pairs, are robust to controlling for a series of worker and firm characteristics, and a host of firm, sector, time and state fixed effects, and heterogeneous trends.

Keywords: Trade; Comparative Advantage; Gender Wage Gap; Employer-employee Data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F16 J16 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sef/media/econ/research/workingpapers/2021/wp925.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Export, Female Comparative Advantage and the Gender Wage Gap (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qmw:qmwecw:925

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Owen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).