Pay incentives, intangibles, and gender wage inequality
研究了激励薪酬制度对机构内性别工资差距的影响，发现其缓解作用仅在无形资产密集度低的行业中显著，基于2006-2018年欧洲五国数据。
This research focuses on the effects of incentive pay schemes (IPSs) on the within-establishment gender wage gap and explores whether the intensity of intangible capital at the industry level moderates such effects. To this aim, we use establishment-level data from various waves (from 2006 to 2018) of the SES – Structure of Earning Surveys for the five largest European economies (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the UK). Data on intangible capital stocks (on 25 industries) are from the EU-KLEMS database. The analysis, which addresses potential endogeneity issues, indicates that more pervasive use of IPSs alleviates the adjusted gender pay gap. However, this inequality-attenuating effect of IPSs materialises only in contexts where intangible capital intensity is low. The result is confirmed if we replicate the analysis in subsamples of establishments belonging to industries with high/low intensity of various intangible capital components, but training emerges as a notable exception.