摘要：There is evidence of a negative cross-country correlation between gender wage
and employment gaps. We argue that non-random selection of women into work
explains an important part of such correlation and thus of the observed
variation in wage gaps. The idea is that, if women who are employed tend to have
relatively high-wage characteristics, low female employment rates may become
consistent with low gender wage gaps simply because low-wage women would not
feature in the observed wage distribution. We explore this idea across the US
and EU countries estimating gender gaps in potential wages. We recover
information on wages for those not in work in a given year using alternative
imputation techniques. Imputation is based on (i) wage observations from nearest
available waves in the sample, (ii) observable characteristics of the
nonemployed and (iii) a statistical repeated-sampling model. We then estimate
median wage gaps on the resulting imputed wage distributions, thus simply
requiring assumptions on the position of the imputed wage observations with
respect to the median, but not on their level. We obtain higher median wage gaps
on imputed rather than actual wage distributions for most countries in the
sample. However, this difference is small in the US, the UK and most central and
northern EU countries, and becomes sizeable in Ireland, France and southern EU,
all countries in which gender employment gaps are high. In particular,
correction for employment selection explains more than a half of the observed
correlation between wage and employment gaps.
