Discriminación laboral por grupo etario en el sector informal de la economía ecuatoriana

Abstract

The age wage gap refers to systematic differences in labor earnings across age groups, arising from disparities in observable characteristics as well as from differences in the returns to those characteristics. Within this framework, this study analyzes the wage gap between young and non-young workers in Ecuador’s informal labor market over the period 2018–2024, using microdata from the National Survey of Employment, Unemployment and Underemployment (ENEMDU). The analysis combines the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition at the mean with its distributional extension based on Recentered Influence Function (RIF) regressions to examine both the sources of the wage gap and its behavior across the wage distribution. The results show that the wage gap is statistically significant in most of the years analyzed and is driven by differences in human capital and job characteristics, particularly at the lower end of the wage distribution. However, in specific years, most notably 2019, 2021, and 2023, significant differences in returns appear, captured by the unexplained part, suggesting the presence of age-related labor market segmentation affecting young workers.