Research

Working Papers


US Salary History Bans: Strategic Disclosure by Job Applicants and the Gender Pay Gap [Link to initial SSRN Version] [ISPS Blog]


I study the effects of US salary history bans which restrict employers from inquiring about job applicants' pay history during the hiring process, but allow candidates to voluntarily share information. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that these policies narrowed the gender pay gap significantly by 2 p.p., driven almost entirely by an increase in female earnings. The bans were also successful in weakening the auto-correlation between current and future earnings, especially among job-changers. I provide novel evidence showing that when employers could no longer nudge candidates for information, the likelihood of voluntarily disclosing salary history decreased among job applicants and by 2 p.p. more among women. I then develop a salary negotiation model with asymmetric information between job applicants and the prospective employers about candidates' pay history. In this framework I allow job applicants to choose whether to reveal pay history, and use this framework to explain my empirical findings on disclosure behavior and gender pay gap. 

Does Pay Transparency Affect the Gender Wage Gap? Evidence from Austria  (AEJ-Economic Policy) [Link to old version]

with Andreas Gulyas and Sebastian Seitz


We study the 2011 Austrian Pay Transparency Law, which requires firms above a size threshold to publish internal reports on the gender pay gap. Using an event-study design, we show that the policy had no discernible effects on male and female wages, thus leaving the gender wage gap unchanged. The effects are precisely estimated and we rule out that the policy narrowed the gender wage gap by more than 0.4 p.p.. Moreover, we do not find evidence for wage compression within establishments. We discuss several possible reasons why the reform did not reduce the gender wage gap. 

Pay Transparency, Workplace Norms, and the Gender Pay Gap - Early Evidence from Germany

with Sebastian Seitz


We study the 2018 German Pay Transparency policy which allows employees in establishments with more than 200 workers, to ask their employers for information about the average earnings of their opposite-gender coworkers who do `equal work'. Using an event study design and matched employer-employee data, we show that the policy had no discernible effects on male and female wages, thus leaving the gender wage gap unchanged. Using survey evidence, we further show that only 1% of men and 2.7% of women had asked their employers for information in the previous year. We find that workers were not willing to ask for information either because they believed that there was no significant gender pay gap at their workplaces or because they were apprehensive of hurting their `image'. We argue that transparency, as enacted in Germany, placed an additional barrier to information access by requiring workers to seek out information instead of mandating firms to disclose data. 


Work in Progress


Transferable Skills, Workplace Training, and Optimal Policy Design 

Wage Returns to Training in the Tech Industry (with Zhengren Zhu) [AEA Registry]