Decomposition of Gender Wage Inequalities through Calibration: Application to the Swiss Structure of Earnings Survey

This paper proposes a new approach to decompose the wage difference between men and women that is based on a calibration procedure. This approach generalizes two current decomposition methods that are re-expressed using survey weights. The first one is the Blinder-Oaxaca method and the second one is a reweighting method proposed by DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux. The new approach provides a weighting system that enables us to estimate such parameters of interest like quantiles. An application to data from the Swiss Structure of Earnings Survey shows the interest of this method.