Working Paper: NBER ID: w25834
Authors: Michael Baker; Yosh Halberstam; Kory Kroft; Alexandre Mas; Derek Messacar
Abstract: We examine the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. The laws, which enable public access to the salaries of individual faculty if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced in different provinces at different times. Using detailed administrative data covering the majority of faculty in Canada, and an event-study research design that exploits within-province variation in exposure to the policy across institutions and academic departments, we find robust evidence that the laws reduced the gender pay gap between men and women by approximately 20-40 percent.
Keywords: pay transparency; gender gap; salary disclosure
JEL Codes: J0; J3; J31
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| public sector salary disclosure laws (J45) | gender pay gap (J31) |
| public sector salary disclosure laws (J45) | conditional gender gap (J16) |
| gender pay gap (J31) | women's salaries (J31) |
| gender pay gap (J31) | men's salaries (J31) |
| public sector salary disclosure laws (J45) | growth in women's salaries (J39) |
| public sector salary disclosure laws (J45) | growth in men's salaries (J39) |