Do Firms Respond to Gender Pay Gap Transparency?

Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskriftTidsskriftartikelForskningfagfællebedømt

We examine the effect of pay transparency on the gender pay gap and firm outcomes. Using a 2006 legislation change in Denmark that requires firms to provide gender-disaggregated wage statistics, detailed employee-employer administrative data, and difference-in-differences and difference-in-discontinuities designs, we find that the law reduces the gender pay gap, primarily by slowing wage growth for male employees. The gender pay gap declines by 2 percentage points, or 13% relative to the prelegislation mean. Despite the reduction of the overall wage bill, the wage transparency mandate does not affect firm profitability, likely because of the offsetting effect of reduced firm productivity.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftJournal of Finance
Vol/bind77
Udgave nummer4
Sider (fra-til)2051-2091
Antal sider41
ISSN0022-1082
DOI
StatusUdgivet - aug. 2022

Bibliografisk note

Funding Information:
Morten Bennedsen is at the University of Copenhagen and INSEAD. Elena Simintzi is at the University of North Carolina, Kenan‐Flagler Business School, and CEPR. Margarita Tsoutsoura is at Washington University in St. Louis, CEPR, and NBER. Daniel Wolfenzon is at Columbia University and NBER. We thank our discussants Irem Demirci, Daniel Ferreira, Camille Hebert, David Matsa, Geoff Tate, Karin Thorburn, and Rebecca Zarutskie. We are grateful for excellent comments from seminar participants at UC San Diego, IESE Barcelona, Columbia Business School, Cornell University, Darden, INSEAD, UIC, UCLA, ASU as well as from conference participants at LBS Summer Finance Symposium, Stanford SITE conference, CEPR Incentives, Management and Organization 2018 conference, European Commission‐Gender Equality Unit, Colorado Finance Summit, Swedish House of Finance and AFFECT conference, the Corporate Finance Beyond Public Companies conference, 2019 SOLE conference, 2019 EFA meetings, 2019 WFA meetings, and 2020 AEA meetings. We thank Brian J. Lee and Jiacheng Yan for excellent research assistance, He Zhang for data management, and Mona Larsen (VIVE), Helle Holt (VIVE), and Maria Boysen (Statistic Office Denmark) for help understanding data. We are grateful for financial support from the Danish National Research Foundation (Niels Bohr Professorship) and the Danish Finance Institute. We have read disclosure policy and we have no conflicts of interest to disclose. The Journal of Finance's

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 the American Finance Association.

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