WAGE DIFFERENTIALS AND ASYMMETRIC MOBILITY

We explore whether a priority given to a husband's career within a family could partly explain the gender wage gap. We show that restrictions preventing women from pursuing job opportunities, regardless of location, are likely to depress women's relative pay more than will restrictions requiring women to place a high value on non-pecuniary aspects of jobs. However, neither restriction is likely to have a large effect in the absence of interaction with investment in firm-specific human capital. The effects of such restrictions on wage differentials are likely to be large enough that empirical studies which do not examine wages, human capital investment and job search in a simultaneous equations framework could produce results which are seriously biased. © 1990.