Abstract
This paper studies Chile's 2009 Equal Pay for Equal Work law and its impact on manufacturing plant behavior. Using the difference-in-discontinuities design to exploit the law's quasi-experimental properties, I find that large plants with disclosure requirements and substantially higher penalties increase female employment across occupations compared to the control group. However, the female percentage increases only for executives and white-collar workers. This finding is consistent with imperfect competition models in the female labor market that predict that occupations with wider gender pay gaps would see the most improvements in relative female employment under equal pay. Plant average compensation package and new capital investments in new machinery increase, but plant productivity measures show no significant differences from those of the control group.
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