Sociology Commons^™

Bootstrapping Statistical Inferences Of Decomposition Methods For Gender Earnings Differentials, Yue Ma, Ying Chu Ng

Centre for Public Policy Studies : CPPS Working Paper Series

Applying the standard bootstrapping technique with corrections for heteroskedasticity for a sample of the 1997 Urban Household Survey in China, the present paper attempts to test (1) whether the commonly used decomposition methods for gender earnings differentials give significantly different results, and (2) whether the explained component is significantly different from the unexplained component (which is commonly referred to as discrimination) within each decomposition method. Based on a national data set, the empirical results indicated some significant differences in both tests. The implication of the results is that the proposed bootstrapping technique can be regarded as a guideline on applying …