Minimum wages and the gender gap in pay. Evidence from the UK and Ireland

Olivier Bargain, Karina Doorley and Philippe Van Kerm

No 2016-02, LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)

Abstract: Since women are disproportionately in low paid work, they should benefit the most from minimum wage policies. We exploit the introduction of a national minimum wage (MW) in Ireland (in 2000) and the UK (in 1999) to check this prediction. Using panel survey data, we implement difference-in-difference estimation of a distribution regression model. We separate out "price" effects from "composition" effects. A large reduction of the gap at low wages is found for Ireland, with small spill-over effects further up in the distribution. There is hardly any effect in Britain, largely because of apparent non-compliance with the minimum wage legislation.

Keywords: gender wage gap; minimum wage; distribution regression; UK; Ireland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.liser.lu/publi_viewer.cfm?tmp=3935 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
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:irs:cepswp:2016-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LISER Working Paper Series from Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) 11, Porte des Sciences, L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, G.-D. Luxembourg. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Library and Documentation ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).