Measuring Selectivity-Corrected Gender Wage Gaps in the EU

We investigate different techniques to assess the gender pay gap in five EU countries (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom), focusing on self-selection into market work. Results show that selectivity correction has an impact on both wage estimates and wage gap decomposition. If there is a positive correlation between the wage and the propensity to participate, the estimated pay gap understates the true difference in earnings when self-selection is ignored. The estimated pay gap differs considerably at different quantiles of the wage distribution, and is sensitive to the choice of estimator.