Abstract

Previous literature has established that women earn less than men, a pattern that is strikingly stable across countries, yet declining over time. One challenge when studying the gender wage gap is that men and women di er in (un)observable characteristics, and that women may sort into di erent jobs than men. In this paper we investigate how substitutable women and men are if they work in the exact same job position. For this purpose, we rst identify worker deaths in German social security data in 1980- 2018. We then compute the wage gap between the deceased worker and her successor for di erent gender combinations. Our main nding is that holding the job position constant, men following deceased women earn substantially higher wages. The opposite is true for women following deceased men.