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Recent studies from different countries suggest that the gender gap is not constant across the wage distribution and the average wage gap provides limited information on women’s relative position in the labour market. Using micro level data from official statistics, this study explores the gender wage‐gap in Turkey across the wage distribution. The quantile regression and counterfactual decomposition analysis results reveal three striking features of the Turkish labour market. The first is that the gender wage gap is more pronounced at the upper tail of the wage distribution, implying the existence of a glass ceiling effect for women in the Turkish labour market. The second is that, the glass ceiling effect in Turkey is not observed in the raw gender wage gap and only revealed after controlling for workers’ labour market qualifications implying that women are better qualified and better educated than their male counterparts’ at the upper tail of the wage distribution. The third finding is that despite the narrowing effect of the women’s relative labour market qualifications, the glass ceiling effect in the Turkish labour market exists due to unequal treatment of men and women and the increasing labour market discrimination toward women as we move up the wage distribution.

In this paper, we explore the recent gender wage gap trends in a sample of European countries with a new approach that uses the direct measures of skill requirements of jobs held by men and women. We find that, during the 1990s and 2000s, the gender wage gap declined in the majority of the European countries. Similar to the U.S. experience, a part of this decline is explained by changes in returns to brain and brawn skills in Austria and in the U.K. However, in contrast to the U.S. experience, the changes in returns to brain and brawn skills had a widening effect on the gender wage gap in Southern European countries and in Ireland. Furthermore, we find that a substantial part of the changes in the gender wage gaps in European countries and in the U.S. cannot be explained by the changes in brain and brawn skill prices. The findings of this study suggest the importance of changes in labor market institutions in explaining the gender wage gap trends.

This paper estimates labor supply elasticities of married men and women allowing for heterogeneity among couples (by educational attainments of husbands and wives) and modeling explicitly how household members interact and make their labor supply decisions. We find that the labor supply decisions of husbands and wives depend on each other, unless both spouses are highly educated (college or above). For high{educated couples, the labor supply decisions of husband and wife are jointly determined only if they have pre-school children. We also find that labor supply elasticities differ greatly among households. The participation own wage elasticity is largest (0.77) for low{educated women married to low educated men, and smallest (0.03) for high{educated women married to low educated men. The own wage elasticities for low educated women married to high{educated men and for high{educated women married to high{educated men are similar and fall between these two extremes (about 0.30). For all types of couples, participation elasticity of non{labor family income is small. We also find that cross wage elasticities for married women are relatively small (less than -0.05) if they are married to low educated men and larger (-0.37) if they are married to high{educated men. Allowing for heterogeneity across couples yields an overall participation wage elasticity of 0.56, a cross wage elasticity of -0.13 and an income elasticity of -0.006 for married women. The analysis in this paper provides a natural framework to study how changes in educational attainments and household structure affect aggregate labor supply elasticities.