The Gender Wage Gap and Wage Arrears in Russia:Evidence from the RLMS

Using the RLMS, this paper re-examines the nature of the gender wage gap in Russia between1994 and 1998 taking into account the pervasiveness of Russia’s non-payment institutions. Investigatingdiscrimination ‘bands’ at different sections of the income distribution and for various important sub-groupswe found the following. Using censored regressions that capture the effect of wage arrears and payment inkind,the wage gap is larger than estimates derived using OLS. The wage gap is distributed unevenly bothacross the income distribution and between various sub-groups. Specifically, women at the lower end of theincome distribution suffer the highest degree of discrimination. However, we find that wage arrears andpayment in-kind attenuated wage discrimination, in particular amongst the lowest paid workers. Theevidence seems to suggest that Russian enterprise managers assigned importance to equity considerationswhen allocating wage arrears and payment in-kind...