The gender wage gap and wage arrears in Russia: Evidence from the RLMS

This paper re-examines the gender wage gap in Russia between 1994 and 1998 taking into account the pervasiveness of Russia’s non-payment institutions. Using censored regression techniques we investigate wage discrimination at different sections of the income distribution and for various important sub-groups. We find that the wage gap is distributed unevenly. Most notably, women at the lower end of the income distribution suffer the highest degree of discrimination. However, we find that wage arrears and payment in-kind attenuated wage discrimination, particularly amongst the lowest paid workers, suggesting that Russian enterprise managers assigned importance to equity considerations when allocating these forms of non-payment.