Wage Gap: The Influence Of Labor Market, Human Capital And Household-registration

Wage gap is a hot topic in the fields of social stratification and mobility research, what's the main factor and by what mechanism, academia has carried out a lot of research. According to the inspiration of existing literatures and the institutional environment reality of our country, this study focused on the influence of labor market, human capital and household-registration and its mechanism. The data analyzed in this study came from an existing database——CGSS2010.It was found that labor market, human capital and household-registration all play important roles in wage gap. From the point of its mechanism, the sector segmentation and position isolation in labor market should be the first concern. Sector segmentation was probably more influenced by household-registration, which granted non-agriculture and local accounts more advantages in entering state-owned monopolies compared with agriculture and non-local accounts, while position isolation was probably more influenced by human capital, the more human capital the greater chance of entering managerial position.On this basis, human capital influenced wage gap probably more through job position while household-registration influenced wage gap probably more through market sector, and relatively, the former played a greater role than the latter. Further analysis found that, the wage effect of human capital and household-registration varied significantly under different labor market conditions: the wage return of human capital and household-registration status differ when market sector and job position was different, wage return of human capital also differ when household-registration status was different, thus lead the wage discrimination between different labor groups.The mean decomposition of logarithmic wage gap also found that the wage gap between managerial position and non-managerial position was the largest among different labor groups. Wage gap between local and non-local accounts, managerial and non-managerial position possessed more discrimination element than others. Moreover, wage discrimination between different labor groups was probably more brought by the overestimation of labor value of advantaged labor groups, i.e. by “negative discrimination”.Finally, theoretical and policy implications based on findings above were discussed.