Rent-sharing, gender wage inequality and female-led firms

Advisor: Claudio Ferraz

Co-advisor: Gabriel Ulyssea

Gender wage inequality has been widely studied and many explanations have been advanced in the literature. There is growing evidence that firms play an important role in explaining this inequality. In this paper, I make use of a unique setting with exogenous demand shocks to firms to identify if there is evidence of rent-sharing by firms and whether it differs between male and female workers. Controlling for worker quality, I find that increases in the value of the demand shock per worker do not lead to increases in wages. Demand shocks do not have effects on neither male nor female wages. Furthermore, I use a new dataset containing information on gender of firm’s owner and I examine if female and male-led firms behave differently towards their employees. I find no evidence of differential rent-sharing through the structure of the firms’ ownership.