Exploring gender and geographic wage inequalities based on full career sequences

Substantive literature examined the gender wage gap, its components and how it changes over time. The decisions that workers make in their career paths when changing occupations, entering new industries or moving to another municipality, have a major impact on the evolution of their wage trajectories. Women and men follow different typical paths across industries and occupations. If changes in career paths are accompanied by geographical moves, these job-related relocations may have an additional wage effect, as different sizes of settlements offer different labor market opportunities. Larger cities or metropolitan areas typically offer higher wages than smaller municipalities. The wage returns to career changes and geographical relocation may differ by gender, affecting the wage gap between women and men. In our study, we examine the wage effects of occupational and geographical mobility by exploring gender differences over individual’s careers.  We identify complete career sequences from Hungarian administrative data and use these career sequences as explanatory variables to examine the urbanization wage premium and the wage effects of moving. Our results show that the wage effects of different types of shifts differ between the two sexes: both in terms of immediate wage benefits and in terms of the long-run expected wages of potential career paths that open up with shifts.