The Impact of Privatisation on Wages: Evidence from the Portugese Banking Industry

This paper adopts a difference-in-differences estimator to examine the impact of privatisation on wages in the Portuguese banking industry for the period 1989-97. The design of the reform and the nature of dataset employed (matched employer-employee) provided a particularly important opportunity to analyse the effects of privatisation on different demographic groups, using multiple control groups, and considering the timing of the effects. The empirical evidence suggests a U-shaped relationship between wage variation and time period of restructuring, regardless of the choice of the comparison group, for those employees, either men or women, retained by privatised firms.