Understanding the Gender Gap Further: The Case of Turn-of-the-Century Swedish Compositors
利用瑞典全国范围的雇主-雇员匹配数据，研究1900年左右排字工人的性别工资差距，发现企业间的性别分配差异解释了约17%的工资差距，尤其在城市地区更为显著。
To better understand the historical gender wage gap, we investigate the wages of Swedish compositors circa 1900 using a rich data set of matched employer-employee information with national coverage. In line with previous findings, women earned about 70 percent of men’s wages on average. Individual and job characteristics explain much of this shortfall. Firm characteristics or firm fixed effects, on average, explain 17 percent of the gap, though the firm mattered more for the gender gap in big cities than elsewhere. Sorting across firms is thus an important part of understanding historical gender wage gaps. While most studies conclude that a significant portion of the gender gap is unexplained, suggesting labor market discrimination, this may result from a lack of information on the distribution of men and women across firms.