Brecha salarial entre hombres y mujeres y ciclo económico en Colombia

Abstract

"The study focuses on the relationship between the business cycle and the gender wage gap in Colombia. We find that the gender hourly wage gap is procyclical for the population aged 25 to 55 years old. We use a pseudo-panel with annual data from the Household Survey from 1984 to 2006 for the 7 main Colombian cities in order to determine the mechanisms behind the cyclicality of the gender hourly wage gap. We propose three hypotheses: i) the additional worker effect, ii) changes in compositions of the formal and informal workers by gender and iii) changes in sectorial composition by gender. We estimate two regressions: the first one quantifies the hourly gender wage gap based on control variables and the business cycle, the second one seeks to decompose the effect of the economic cycle in the 3 hypotheses already mentioned before, taking the predicted values of the hourly gender gap obtained in the first regression. After making various regressions by random effects, we find strong evidence in favor of the first hypothesis."