Salary History Bans and the Gender Wage Gap

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Recent efforts to address the gender wage gap have led state and local legislators to enact policies limiting an employer’s access to a prospective employee’s salary history. These salary history bans are intended to remedy existing wage inequality by preventing employers from differentiating between candidates with lower historic wages and those without, thus necessitating more equitable wages for future employees. Opponents of these policies argue that they place an undue burden on employers with limited effect on the wage gap. This study investigates the efficacy of salary history bans by analyzing their impact on the wage gap for employees of the State of New Jersey and the Government of New York City. I find conflicting effects, with salary history bans exacerbating the wage gap for new hires in New Jersey but improving it in New York City. The increased wage gap in New Jersey, however, appears to be the result of an effect predating the implementation of the policy. Statewide analysis complicates the outcome, identifying a reduction in the wage gap in New Jersey’s private sector but finding no significant change in the public sector or in New York City at all. Overall, the results suggest that it is unlikely that salary history bans have any large effect on the wage gap, positive or negative.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 14, 2020

Author	Yu, Edward
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of Economics
Advisor	Oyer, Paul

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/gm908nk6561

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Yu, Edward. (2020). Salary History Bans and the Gender Wage Gap. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/gm908nk6561

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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