Education and Gender Gap in the Labor Market Participation: Argentina?s Case Evidence

Albacete

Congreso; XV Labour Economics Meeting; 2022

Spanish Association of Labour Economics (AEET)

AbstractInformality is a problem that exists in many Latin American countries and, in that context, Argentina is not the exception. The objective of this study was to assess how education impact on the probability of labor market participation, classified into three ordinal categories: unemployment, formal and informal employment. An ordered multinomial logit model is employed, differentiating between men and women, based on the data obtained from the Ongoing Household Survey (EPH) of the Argentine National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC), restricting the sample to salaried and unemployed workers. The results show that a higher level of education favors labor market participation and improves working conditions, regardless of gender. Also, a labor gap in favor of men is verified, being this the most evident finding in the probability of being formal or informal. However, as more years of education accumulate, the gap narrows, and the throughput of one additional year of education in women is greater than in men. In this way, policies aiming at promoting schooling could have three simultaneous effects: (i) improve levels of schooling in the population; (ii) favor access conditions to the formal labor market; (iii) reduce gender gaps in the ways of participation in the labor market.