Estimating the Public-Private Wage Gap in Russia : What Does Quantile Regression Tell Us?

This paper explores the public-private wage gap in the Russian economy along the whole wage distribution. Using the RLM-HSE data set, it examines how gaps at various points of the distribution changed from 2000-2014 and presents decompositions of the gaps into components explained by differences in characteristics and differences in returns. The results suggest that the gap persists over time and varies along the wage distribution. During the 2000s low-skilled public sector workers had smaller pay gaps than higher-skilled workers had. Governmental policy interventions and the economic crisis of 2008-2009 contributed to the narrowing of the gap and its partial equalization along the distribution. A new set of policy changes associated with the May 2012 Presidential Decrees strengthened these tendencies but did not eliminate the gaps