Seminario 15/13: J. L. Groizard (Universitat Illes Balears) –Dissecting the Exporter Wage Gap in Spain

It is well known that exporter firms pay higher wages and are more skill intensive than domestic firms. In this paper we measure and decompose the exporter wage gap into several explanatory components by estimating counterfactual distributions for the Spanish manufacturing sector between 1995 and 2010. We find that conditional wages are more compressed at exporter firms, dierences in characteristics are relatively less important at the center and that dierences in unobservable characteristics have a U-inverted shape. Separate analysis by education and sex shows that the higher educated workers receive a lower premium than low and medium educated workers at exporter firms. Women earn less than men but differences are overcome -even inverted- at the highest education levels. The evolution over time reveals that the exporter premium varies pro-cyclically and in opposite direction than economy-wide wage inequality. These findings imply that the exporter sector contributes ambiguously to generate -between and within group- wage inequality, depending on the position of the economy along the business cycle.