Research Seminar with Simon Janssen

“SOCIAL ATTITUDES ON GENDER EQUALITY AND FIRMS’ DISCRIMINATORY PAY SETTINGS”
- Paper presentation by Simon Janssen, IAB, Bundesanstalt für Arbeit and IZA

The study analyzes the relationship between discriminatory social attitudes and the variation of within-firm pay gaps by combining data on regional votes on gender equality laws with a data set of multi-establishments firms and their workers. The data set allows us for the first time to study gender pay gaps within the same firm across establishments located in regions with varying discriminatory social attitudes. Our results show that firms have larger pay gaps in regions with stronger discriminatory social attitudes. This result remains robust when we account for detailed worker and job characteristics and prevails for different subsamples. Thus we show that a relationship between discriminatory social attitudes and gender pay gaps prevails even after accounting for the sorting of women and men into different firms and occupations.

Simon Janssen did his undergrad studies at the Leibniz University of Hannover. In 2006 he came to the University of Zurich were he obtained his Ph.D. in 2011. During his Ph.D. he spent 7 month at the Copenhagen Business School. In 2012 Simon Janssen was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Industrial Relation Section of the Princeton University, and he spent the year of 2013 as a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Business in Stanford. He has been a researcher at IAB since May 2014. His main research interests are labor economics, personnel economics, and economics of education.

You can read the paper in the file attached above.