The Gender Wage Gap during Serbia's Transition

Using Labor Force Surveys for the period 2001-2005, we find that the mean gender wage gap is low in Serbia and declined over this period. Decompositions show that the mean gap is not explained by differences in productive characteristics. Further, we find that the gender wage gap decreased across all conditional quantiles of the wage distribution. Women, on average, possess relatively more productive characteristics and receive higher returns to those attributes than men, which has more than offset the large residual component. Overall, women seem to have benefited in terms of their relative earnings in this first phase of transition in Serbia.