Bootstrapping the European Gender Wage Gap

This paper investigates the gender wage gap in Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Spain by boostrapping the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The boostrap method is used to compute confidence intervals and perform hypothesis tests for the (disaggregated) explained and unexplained components of the national earnings differentials between men and women. From the subset of paid employees selected from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) it is revealed that the respective national gender wage gaps are significant at the 5% level. The empirical boostrap distribution of the male-female earnings differential reveals that the average differentials of the four selected countries lie very close together, whereas the boostrap standard deviations of the gaps do not agree.