Is there a glass ceiling in Morocco?: Evidence from matched worker-firm data

Several empirical studies have found larger gender pay gaps at the upper tail of the wage distribution in developed countries, the so-called glass ceiling effect. In this paper, we investigate the relevance of the glass ceiling hypothesis in Morocco using a matched worker–firm data set of more than 8,000 employees and 850 employers working in the manufacturing sector. We estimate linear and quantile earnings regressions with controls for unobserved firm heterogeneity and perform a quantile decomposition. We also focus on the within-firm gender earnings gap using information on the firms' characteristics. Our results show that the gender earnings gap is higher at the top of the distribution than at the bottom. Furthermore, the gender gap widens in the upper tail of the earnings distribution when controlling for firm fixed effects.