City Research Online

Abstract

This paper provides the first decomposition of the extent to which the UK disability pay gap is a consequence of within-firm inequality and the allocation of workers across firms. We use linked employer-employee data which matches high quality information from employer payroll records to Census data on disability. Our findings indicate that the distribution of disabled and non-disabled employees across firms acts to reinforce within-firm disability-related pay inequality. However, both the raw and unexplained disability pay gap predominately exist within rather than between firms. That the disability pay gap is driven primarily by within-firm wage-setting supports the introduction of employer disability pay gap reporting in the UK.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2026, © The Author(s) [2026]. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords:	disability pay gap, wage discrimination, linked employer-employee data
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

Export

Downloads