Abstract

This paper identifies the impact of taste-based discrimination on labor market outcomes for nine Latin American countries. We use homogenized survey data on skilled workers to estimate a search and matching model of the labor market with explicit prejudice against women, participation decisions, and occupational choices. This is the first attempt of analyzing gender discrimination using a structural approach for Latin American countries and from a cross-country perspective. By shutting down all potential sources of gender gaps one by one, we find that prejudice is the only source that consistently hurts women, playing a larger role in explaining gender wage gaps at the bottom of the wage distribution. Additionally, prejudice has strong negative effects on gender gaps in participation, employment/unemployment, and self-employment rates.