Selected Work in Progress
Selected Work in Progress
Gender equality and globalization: New international evidence (with Klaus Gründler, Niklas Potrafke and Jan-Egbert Sturm)
Schmid, R. (2025). Mind the gap: effects of the national minimum wage on the gender wage gap in Germany. The Journal of Economic Inequality, 1-30. Link
Since 2015, the national minimum wage aims to benefit primarily low-wage workers in Germany. I examine how the minimum wage influences gender wage gaps of full-time workers within the lower half of the wage distribution on a regional level. Using administrative data, distinct regional differences in the extent of gender wage gaps and responses to the minimum wage become clear. Overall, wage gaps between men and women at the 10th percentile decrease by 2.46 and 6.34 percentage points in the West and East of Germany after 2015. Applying counterfactual wage distributions, I show that introducing the minimum wage explains decreases in gender wage gaps by 60% to 95%. Group-specific analyses demonstrate various responses based on age, educational level and occupational activity. Counterfactual aggregate Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions indicate that discriminatory remuneration structures decrease in the West of Germany after introducing the minimum wage.
Schmid, R. (2023). Migration and wage inequality: a detailed analysis for German metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions. Review of Regional Research, 1-55. Link
This study presents new evidence on immigrant-native wage gaps considering regional-specific differences between 2000 and 2019 in Germany. Using linked employer-employee-data, unconditional quantile regression models are estimated in order to assess the degree of labour market integration of foreign workers. The applied extended version of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method provides evidence on driving factors behind wage gaps along the entire wage distribution. Estimated results are presented not only for the whole ofWest Germany but also differentiated between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. On average, larger wage differentials are identified in metropolitan areas with at the same time a higher presence of foreign population. Detailed decompositions show that there are not only changes in the relative importance of explanatory factors over time, but also possible sources of wage differentials shift between different points of the wage distribution. Decisive explanatory variables in this context are the practised profession, the economic sector affiliation and the extent of labour market experience. Distinguishing between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas, provides evidence that especially differences in educational attainment impact wage gaps in urban areas. Regarding the size of overall estimated wage gaps, after 2012 a reversal in trend and particular increasing tendencies around median wages are revealed.
Brall, F., & Schmid, R. (2023). Automation, robots and wage inequality in Germany: A decomposition analysis. LABOUR, 37(1), 33-95. Link
We conduct a decomposition analysis based on recentered influence function (RIF) regressions to disentangle the relative importance of automation and robotization for wage inequality in the manufacturing sector in Germany between 1996 and 2017. Our measure of automation threat combines occupation-specific scores of automation risk with sector-specific robot densities. We find that besides changes in the composition of individual characteristics, structural shifts among different automation threat groups are a non-negligible factor associated with wage inequality between 1996 and 2017. Moreover, the increase in wage dispersion among the different automation threat groups has contributed significantly to higher wage inequality in the 1990s and 2000s.