In this paper, we investigate labor income profiles in Turkey. In doing so, we investigate the role of educational attainment, gender, and the public versus private sector employment on labor income profiles by using the Household Budget Survey data from 2002 to 2014. We first report that while average labor income profile in Turkey exhibits a moderate hump-shape over age, there exists an immense degree of heterogeneity in labor income trajectories over education, gender and sector of employment. Second, while the public sector employment is more advantageous for low-educated Turkish employees, university graduates in Turkey's labor market face a risk versus return trade-off in their choice of sectoral employment: the private sector labor income profiles display both a higher level of average income and a higher degree of cross-sectional variation compared to their public sector counterparts. Third, we report a significant gender pay gap especially among low-educated workers, which aligns well with historically low female participation rates in Turkey. Our findings via distributional clustering analysis, ordinary least squares and pseudo-panel estimations all indicate that in attempts to infer about economy-wide average labor income profiles, abstracting away from any of these listed factors could lead to misleading inferences.

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