Structural Change in Wage Differentiation Patterns for Turkey in Terms of Working in the Same Industry

This paper investigates the wage differentiation patterns in Turkey between couples who work in the same industry and those who work in different industries. The Turkish Household Labor Force Surveys from 2004 to 2014 are utilized as the main data. As the graphical representation verifies, regions can be grouped into three with respect to wage differentiation. In the first group, differentiation gap remains the same; for the second group, the gap increases; and for the last group, while the gap first decreases and disappears, it then increases again in favor of who the ones who work in the same industry. These findings are valid not only for females’ but also males’ mean hourly income. In the empirical analyses, the squared wage differences are clustered into three categories by using K-Means clustering method. Then, the behavior of each region changing from one cluster to the other are tracked and calculated with variations of this behavior. It is examined that not only eastern regions but also northern and landlocked regions changed their clusters during the last decade. In addition to that, their calculated variation of this behavior is higher compared to the ones for western, southern and seaside regions. If the variation is higher for the region, this is probably due to structural changes in those regions.