Firms and wage inequality in Central and Eastern Europe

Iga Magda , Jan Gromadzki , Simone Moriconi (1)

1 LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221

We use large linked employer-employee data to analyze wage inequality patterns in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries between 2002 and 2014. We show that, unlike in many other advanced economies, wage inequality levels have decreased in almost all CEE countries. These reductions in wage inequality resulted from disproportionately large increases in wages at the bottom of the wage distribution, and from decreases in between-firm wage inequality. We further find that the declines in wage inequality were driven by large wage structure effects that compensated for changes in the composition of workers.

Mots clés: Wages; Wage inequality; RIF Regression; Quantile decomposition; Linked employer-employee data

Domaines: Economies et finances

Iga Magda, Jan Gromadzki, Simone Moriconi. Firms and wage inequality in Central and Eastern Europe. Journal of Comparative Economics, 2021, 49 (2), pp.499-552. ⟨10.1016/j.jce.2020.08.002⟩. ⟨hal-03269977⟩