Bootstrapping the European Gender Wage Gap

This paper investigates the gender wage gap in Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Spain by bootstrapping the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The bootstrap method is used to compute confidence intervals and to perform hypothesis tests for the (disaggregated) explained and unexplained components of the national earnings di?erentials 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 bootstrap distribution of the male-female earnings di?erential reveals that the average di?erentials of the four selected countries lie very close together, whereas the bootstrap standard deviations of the gaps do not agree.