TY  - JOUR
AU  - Leibbrandt,Andreas
AU  - List,John A.
TI  - Do Women Avoid Salary Negotiations? Evidence from a Large Scale Natural Field Experiment
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18511
PY  - 2012
Y2  - November 2012
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18511
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18511.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Andreas Leibbrandt
Department of Economics
Monash University
Clayton, Vic 3800
Australia
E-Mail: andreas.leibbrandt@monash.edu.au

John List
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
1126 East 59th
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 301/405-1288
Fax: 301/314-9091
E-Mail: jlist@uchicago.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2013-04-01
AB  - One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job-seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the nature of sorting and the extent of salary negotiations. We observe interesting data patterns. For example, we find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, this difference disappears, and even tends to reverse. In terms of sorting, we find that men in contrast to women prefer job environments where the ‘rules of wage determination’ are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous.
ER  -