preferences and biases in educational choices and labour market expectations shrinking the black box of gender standard observed characteristics explain only part of the differences between men and women in education choices and labor market trajectories using an experiment to derive students levels of overconfidence and preferences for competitiveness and risk this paper investigates whether these behavioral biases and preferences explain gender differences in college major choices and expected future earnings in a sample of high ability undergraduates we find that competitiveness and overconfidence but not risk aversion is systematically related with expectations about future earnings individuals who are overconfident and overly competitive have significantly higher earnings expectations moreover gender differences in overconfidence and competitiveness explain about 18 of the gender gap in earnings expectations these experimental measures explain as much of the gender gap in earnings expectations as a rich set of control variables including test scores and family background and they are poorly proxied by these same control variables underscoring that they represent independent variation while expected earnings are related to college major choices the experimental measures are not related with college major choice

gender wage gap across the wage distribution in different segments of the indian labour market 1983 2012 exploring the glass ceiling or sticky floor phenomenon abstractwomen s participation in the indian labour market is not only low but they are also engaged in low productivity and low paying jobs further the labour market is segmented by gender type of employment sector and location of residence this study makes an important contribution by examining gender wage gap in india across different segments of the labour market over the wage distribution using national level representative data spanning the period 1983 to 2012 the empirical results suggest that i the male female raw wage gap has declined over time across the wage distribution ii the gender wage gap attributable to differing returns to characteristics has increased over time and there is evidence of convergence of productive characteristics of men and women iii sticky floor rather than glass ceiling phenomenon is observed in all segments of the labour market and iv the adjusted wage gap suggests that women at the bottom of the distribution face higher discrimination than those at the t

is there a glass ceiling in sweden using 1998 data we show that the gender log wage gap in sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail we interpret this as a strong glass ceiling effect we use quantile regression decompositions to examine whether this pattern can be ascribed primarily to gender differences in labor market characteristics or in the rewards to those characteristics even after extensive controls for gender differences in age education both level and field sector industry and occupation we find that the glass ceiling effect we see in the raw data persists to a considerable extent

conformity and the demand for environmental goods the existing literature on eco labeling and green consumerism has been framed within a classical market context where price and quality are the drivers of consumer choice however it seems possible that consumers are also concerned about the choices made by other consumers in fact it is unclear that people s consumption decisions are made independently of social context for instance under the desire to conform to certain social norms or in the presence of status concerns some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society we test this hypothesis using a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans share of fair trade beans and price three treatments were used differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers we find different responses to the treatments across individuals and we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women have

glass ceilings or glass doors the role of firms in male female wage disparities i use canadian linked employer employee data to examine whether women face a glass ceiling in the labour market i also measure the extent to which the glass ceiling comes about because women are segregated into lower paying firms or because they are segregated into lower paying jobs within firms i find clear evidence that women experience a glass ceiling that is driven by their disproportionate sorting across firm types glass doors rather than within firms i find no evidence that these results are supply driven however my results are consistent with predictions of an efficiency wage model where high paying firms discriminate against females

the glass ceiling in politics formalization and empirical tests there is a scarcity of women at the apex of political power as well as a lack of methods to disentangle the potential sources of this under representation this article suggests a four step method to test for whether women s under representation can be explained by the existence of a glass ceiling we emphasize that this concept implies discrimination in promotions within the political organization that the discriminatory promotions increase in severity at the top levels of power and that they increase in severity during an individual s career trajectory the proposed method is applied to subnational politics in sweden a long standing world leader in women s descriptive representation the results support the conjecture that a glass ceiling is hindering elected women s rise to political power in this context

gender sorting and the glass ceiling in high tech firms with few exceptions studies have conceived of the glass ceiling as reflecting internal promotion biases in this article the authors argue that glass ceiling patterns can also be the result of external recruitment and hiring processes using data on people applying by means of the internet for jobs at 441 small and medium sized high tech firms they find evidence that the glass ceiling is produced by both internal and external hiring processes on the supply side females are sorted into lower level job queues than males on the demand side screening biases against women also are evident but a series of what if simulations suggest that demand side screening processes play a comparatively minor role in producing the glass ceiling pattern these results suggest that bias remediation policies designed to equalize gender differences in hiring chances are likely to be less effective than recruitment and outreach policies designed to improve gender disparities in candidate pools

parenthood and the gender gap in pay we compare the income and wage trajectories of women to those of their male partners before and after parenthood focusing on the within couple gap allows us to control for both observed and unobserved attributes of the spouse and to estimate both short and long term effects of entering parenthood we find that 15 years after the first child has been born the male female gender gaps in income and wages have increased by 32 and 10 percentage points respectively in line with a collective labor supply model the magnitude of these effects depends on counterfactual relative incomes or wages within the family

contests as selection mechanisms the impact of risk aversion abstract we investigate how individual risk preferences affect the likelihood of selecting the more able contestant within a two player tullock contest our theoretical model yields two main predictions first an increase in the risk aversion of a player worsens her odds unless she already has a sufficiently large advantage second if the prize money is sufficiently large a less able but less risk averse contestant can achieve an equal or even higher probability of winning than a more able but more risk averse opponent in a laboratory experiment we confirm both the non monotonic impact and the compensating effect of risk aversion on winning probabilities our results suggest a novel explanation for the gender gap and the optimality of limited monetary incentives in selection contests

swimming upstream floating downstream comparing women s relative wage progress in the united states and denmark applying a new decomposition method to u s psid and danish longitudinal sample data the authors compare how u s and danish gender wage gaps developed between 1983 and 1995 in denmark they find the wage gap widened because the worsening in women s relative returns to observable human capital attributes as well as in their ranking relative to men in unobserv able productive attributes more than offset their wage gains from improved observable qualifications relative to men s in the united states in contrast the gender convergence in qualifications offset adverse influences including in creasing wage dispersion throughout the labor market to result in a narrowing of the gap the largest increase in the gap in denmark was experienced by women in the top earnings decile and the largest decline in the gap in the united states affected those at the top and in the middle of the distribution

estimating gender differences in access to jobs this paper proposes a new measure of gender differences in access to jobs based on a job assignment model this measure is the probability ratio of getting a job for a female and a male at each rank of the wage ladder we derive a nonparametric estimator of this access measure and estimate it for french full time executives aged 40 45 in the private sector our results show that the gender difference in the probability of getting a job increases along the wage ladder from 9 to 50 females thus have a significantly lower access to high paid jobs than to low paid jobs

evidence on new technologies and wage inequality in france using individual data from the french labour force survey and the complementary survey on working conditions for 1998 we analyse earnings inequalities along the wage distribution between workers using novel information and communication technologies ict at their job and those not using them we estimate quantile regressions with technological dummies and carry out a decomposition analysis both at the aggregate level and by occupations at the aggregate level most of the wage gap between both populations is explained by the divergence in their labour characteristics in jobs where ict are not very diffused the technological premium is larger than in jobs characterized by a large presence of novel technologies whereas in the former type of jobs the technological premium is mainly justified by a divergence in the labour market characteristics between ict users and nonusers in positions characterized by a wide presence of novel technologies the technological premium responds rather to a divergence in

product market competition and gender discrimination award winning work by the call for competition in the markets a partnership between the office for strategy and studies of the ministry of economy gee and the associacao mutualista montepio

gender discrimination estimation in a search model with matching and bargaining this article develops a search model of the labor market with matching bargaining and employers taste discrimination in which under necessary but standard distributional assumption it is possible to separately identify gender discrimination and unobserved productivity differences the equilibrium shows that both prejudiced and unprejudiced employers wage discriminate maximum likelihood estimates on cps data indicate that half of the employers are prejudiced average female productivity is 6 5 lower and two third of the gender earning differential may be explained by prejudice an affirmative action policy is implemented resulting in a redistribution of welfare from men to women at no cost for employers welfare

do female researchers face a glass ceiling in france a hazard model of promotions the present article examines whether french female researchers face a glass ceiling an invisible barrier to promotion using an original database from the national institute for agricultural research inra we estimate duration models for promotions the methodology used allows us to take into account censored observations and unobserved heterogeneity our results show a significant gender effect that does not contradict the glass ceiling hypothesis in addition factors that boost promotion seem to be radically different according to gender and we present evidence that promotion strategies are different for males and females

the gender wage gap among recent post secondary graduates in canada a distributional approach using the national graduates survey we examine the trends in the gender wage gap among recent post secondary graduates in canada between 1988 and 2007 female graduates earn on average 6 14 less than males during the period two to five years after graduation decompositions show that observable personal characteristics and job attributes can explain only a small portion of the wage gap we also find that men earn more than women at every point of the distribution interestingly the wage difference shrank in the lower half of the distribution in recent years while it increased in the upper half l ecart salarial entre les sexes chez les nouveaux diplomes postsecondaires une approche distributionnelle a l aide de l enquete nationale aupres des diplomes nous examinons les tendances dans l ecart salarial entre les sexes chez les nouveaux diplomes postsecondaires au canada entre 1988 et 2007 les femmes diplomees gagnent en moyenne de 6 a 14 moins que les hommes durant les 2 a 5 ans suivant l obtention du diplome des decompositions montrent que les caracteristiques personnelles et les attributs de l emploi observables ne peuvent expliquer qu une petite partie de l ecart salarial nous trouvons aussi que les hommes touchent plus que les femmes a chaque point de la distribution salariale de maniere interessante la difference de salaire a diminue dans la moitie inferieure de la distribution lors des annees recentes alors qu elle a augmente dans la moitie superieure

unionization and the evolution of the wage distribution in sweden 1968 to 2000 using the 1968 1981 and 2000 swedish level of living surveys the authors examine the evolution of the wage distribution in sweden over the periods 1968 1981 and 1981 2000 the first period was t

increasing earnings inequality and the gender pay gap in canada prospects for convergence this paper retraces the evolution of canadian women s labour force participation and of the gender earnings ratio across the generations to understand better the prospects for gender convergence in pay using data from the public use labour force surveys lfs and administrative annual earnings data from the longitudinal worker files lwf the paper assesses the role of increasing top earnings inequality in the persistence of the gender pay gap having identified a growing role for the under representation of women among top earners the paper then performs an evaluation and critical analysis of existing gender equality policies centred on horizontal occupational gender segregation and discusses alternative policies for the future

risk sharing market imperfections asset prices evidence from china s stock market liberalization abstract we examine the roles of risk sharing and other factors in stock price revaluation during a recent liberalization episode in china consistent with the theoretical prediction that liberalizations reduce systematic risk we find that risk sharing explains approximately one fourth of the price revaluation of investible stocks during the eight month window between reform announcement and implementation the firm specific information generated by the reform is more efficiently priced into stocks that have a higher degree of market liquidity information transparency and informed trading

parental leave a policy evaluation of the swedish daddy month reform abstract many governments are making attempts to increase fathers share of parental leave in order to correct for unequal labor market outcomes using swedish data we ask whether fathers can be encouraged to take more parental leave in order to mitigate the negative consequences of mothers career interruptions the unique data stem from a reform of parental leave resulting in a clean natural experiment data comprise all children born before control group and after treatment group the date of implementation of the reform in cohorts of up to 27 000 newborns mothers and fathers we find strong short term effects of the incentives on male parental leave but no behavioral effects in the household fathers in the treatment group do not take larger shares of the leave taken for care of sick children which is our measure for household work we also investigate a second data set on fathers and mothers long term wages and employment without finding evidence for substantial effects of the reform

the role of parenthood on the gender gap among top earners abstract is the wage penalty due to motherhood larger among highly qualified women in this paper we study the effect of parenthood on the careers of high achieving women relative to high achieving men in a set of high earning professions with either nonlinear or linear wage structures using norwegian registry data we find that the child earnings penalty for mothers in professions with a nonlinear wage structure mbas and lawyers is substantially larger than for mothers in professions with a linear wage structure the gender earnings gap for mba and law graduates is around 30 but substantially less for stem and medicine graduates 10 years after childbirth in addition we provide some descriptive statistics on the role of fertility timing on the child earnings penalty

unconditional quantile regressions wage growth and inequality in the philippines 2001 2006 the contribution of covariates i implement a two stage procedure to estimate the components of real wage change in the philippines along the wage distribution from 2001 to 2006 as well as the contribution of individual covariates to each component the methodology is based on re centred influence functions rif as suggested by firpo et al 2009 the advantage of this methodology is that it not only decomposes the unconditional wage change at any quantile of the wage distribution but also allows the characterization of the contribution of any single covariate on each component i find that real earnings of males in the philippines declined and the decline along the earnings distribution is generally higher at higher deciles for all males and higher at lower deciles in manila decomposition results are driven by the wage structure component while the composition effect is small and generally positive with education as the main contributor within the wage structure effect the main determinants are associated with changes in the r

distributional changes in the gender wage gap using panel study of income dynamics psid data the authors analyze changes in wage differentials between white men and women over time and across the entire wage distribution the authors decompose distributional changes in the gender wage gap to assess the contribution of observed characteristics measuring individual productivity they find that the gender wage gap narrowed by 16 at the lowest decile and by less than 5 at the highest decile the decomposition results indicate that changes in the gender wage gap are mainly attributable to changes in educational attainment at the top of the wage distribution with a sizable part due to work history changes at the bottom the findings further reveal that the accuracy of the results depends on the direction in which the decompositions are performed

human capital discrimination and the gender wage gap in bangladesh summary this paper investigates changes in the gender wage gap in bangladesh over the period 1999 2009 the gap in average wages between men and women decreased by 31 over this period this paper shows that a key driver of this change was an improvement in female educational qualifications it also demonstrates that the gender wage gap across the wage distribution narrowed much more at the lower end of the wage distribution than at the upper end it attributes this mainly to a decline in discrimination against women implications for policies aimed at more equal access to education and enforcement of equal pay legislation in bangladesh are also identified

performance related pay and gender wage differences we study the impact of performance related pay prp on gender wage differences using finnish linked employer employee panel data controlling for unobserved person and firm effects we find that bonuses increase women s earnings slightly less than men s but the economic significance of the difference is negligible piece rates and reward rates however tend to increase gender wage differentials thus the nature of a prp plan is important for gauging the impact of prp on gender wage differentials a comparison with ols results shows the importance of controlling for an unobserved person and firm effects

swimming with the tide solidary wage policy and the gender earnings gap this paper addresses the consequences of wage compression for the gender wage gap in sweden during the period 1968 1991 we find that the effects of changes in the wage structure on women s wages have varied over time and have been partly counteracting changes in industry wage differentials have systematically worked against women while changes in the returns to human capital and unobserved characteristics have contributed to reductions in the gender wage gap changes in the wage structure were particularly important between 1968 and 1974 when there was a dramatic reduction in overall wage inequality jel classification j16 j31 j51

bridging the gender gap identifying what is holding self employed women back in ghana rwanda tanzania and the republic of congo quantile decomposition methods are used to study the determinants of the gender gap in self employment earnings across the earnings distribution of four sub saharan countries the republic of congo

gender wage inequality during sri lanka s post reform growth a distributional analysis abstract this paper investigates gender wage inequality in sri lanka during 1992 2014 a period of robust economic growth following pro market reforms the gap in mean wages between men and women decreased steadily over this period unconditional quantile regression reveals the decline in gender wage inequality was driven by the upper half of the distribution and was due to improvements in women s observable human capital yet the pay structure became more unequal indicating widening gender gaps in the returns to labor market characteristics and in unobservable determinants of wages the gender gap in pay structure widened disproportionately in the lower half of the distribution coinciding with falling absolute and relative returns to women in manufacturing industries and production occupations facing greater international competition the study also demonstrates selection bias underestimates the gender wage gap and overestimates the gains in equality over time factors that hinder gender equality in the labor market are discussed along with policy implications

appointments pay and performance in uk boardrooms by gender this article uses uk data to examine issues regarding the scarcity of women in boardroom positions the article examines appointments pay and any associated productivity effects deriving from increased diversity evidence of gender bias in the appointment of women as non executive directors is found together with mixed evidence of discrimination in wages or fees paid however the article finds no support for the argument that gender diverse boards enhance corporate performance proposals in favour of greater board diversity may be best structured around the moral value of diversity rather than with reference to an expectation of improved company performance

wage structure and gender earnings differentials an international comparison using microdata to analyse the gender pay gap in ten industrialized nations we focus on the role of wage structure the prices of labour market skills in influencing the gender gap we find wage structure enormously important in explaining why the us gender gap is higher than that in most other countries we conclude that the us gap would be similar to that in sweden and australia the countries with the smallest gaps if the united states had their levels of wage inequality this finding reflects the larger penalty in the united states for those with low skill levels or employed in low wage sectors 650 o 75 the united states was amoung the countries with the largest differ entials oecd ilo usbls this paper uses microdata to analyse inter national differences in the gender pay gap among a sample of ten industrialized nations we focus particularly on explaining the surprisingly low ranking of the united states in comparison with other industrialized countries an advan tage of an international perspective is that countries vary considerably with respect to governmental policies women s relative labour market qualifications and wage setting institutions such variability allows one to infer reasons for differences in the pay gap and by implication the impact of alternative govern ment policies empirical research on gender pay gaps has traditionally focused on the role of gender differences in qualifications and on differences in the treatment of otherwise equally qualified male and female workers i e labour market dis crimination analyses of trends over time in the gender differential within countries as well as inter country comparisons of gender earnings ratios have tended to emphasize these types of gender specific factors an innovative feature of our study is to focus on the role of wage structure as an additional factor influencing the gender gap to analyse the impact of wage structure we adapt a framework developed by juhn et al 1991 to analyse trends over time in race differentials in the united states our findings suggest that labour market institutions that affect overall wage inequality have an extremely impor tant effect on the gender earnings gap wage structure describes the array of prices set for various labour market skills measured and unmeasured and rents received for employment in par

do generous parental leave policies help top female earners generous government mandated parental leave is generally viewed as an effective policy to support women s careers around childbirth but does it help women to reach top positions in the upper pay echelon of their firms using longitudinal employer employee matched data for the entire norwegian population we address this question exploiting a series of reforms that expanded paid leave from 30 weeks in 1989 to 52 weeks in 1993 the representation of women in top positions has only moderately increased over time and career profiles of female top earners within firms are significantly different from those of their male counterparts the reforms did not affect and possibly decreased the probability for women to be at the top over their life cycle we discuss some implications of this result to put into perspective the design of new family friendly policy interventions

the career dynamics of high skilled women and men evidence from sweden in this paper we use matched worker firm register data from sweden to examine the career dynamics of high skill women and men specifically we track wages for up to 20 years among women and men b

is consumption too smooth for thirty years it has been accepted that consumption is smooth because permanent income is smoother than measured income this paper considers the evidence for the contrary position that permanent income is in fact less smooth than measured income so that the smoothness of consumption cannot be straightforwardly explained by permanent income theory the paper argues that in postwar u s quarterly data consumption is smooth because it responds with a lag to changes in income

a distributional analysis of the gender wage gap in bangladesh this article empirically investigates the gender wage gap in bangladesh during the period 2005 2009 applying unconditional quantile regression models the article demonstrates that women are paid less than men throughout the wage distribution and the gap is higher at the lower end of the distribution discrimination against women is the primary determinant of the wage gap the article also demonstrates that the observed gender wage gap is likely to be underestimated if we ignore selection in full time employment a number of policy implications are discussed

rent sharing as a driver of the glass ceiling effect in this paper we show that rent sharing plays a role in explaining the glass ceiling effect we make use of a unique employer employee panel database for italy from 1996 to 2003 which allows controlling for observed individual and firm heterogeneity and for collective bargaining moreover by means of iv quantile fixed effects estimates we can cope with unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity a discussion of different explanations is provided

gender wage differentials by education in italy in this article we evaluate wage differentials in italy combining gender and education perspectives the main goal of this article is to verify whether the extent of the gender pay gap varies between highly and low educated workers and whether or not the role played by gender differences in characteristics and in market rewards is similar in the two groups we apply quantile regression analysis and an adaptation of the procedure suggested by machado and mata 2005 to evaluate the predicted wage gap at different points of the female wage distribution scale the analysis is carried out on the italian sample of the last available year of the european community household panel echp we show that the extent and the trend of the gap predicted across the female distribution is sharply different between groups with diverse educational levels in the case of low educated workers although the predicted gap is largely explained by differences in rewards lower levels of education or experience are responsible

early gender gaps among university graduates abstract we use data from six cohorts of university graduates in germany to assess the extent of gender gaps in college and labor market performance twelve to eighteen months after graduation men and women enter college in roughly equal numbers but more women than men complete their degrees women enter college with slightly better high school grades but women leave university with slightly lower marks immediately following university completion male and female full timers work a very similar number of hours per week but men earn more than women across the pay distribution with an unadjusted gender gap in full time monthly earnings of about 20 log points on average including a large set of controls reduces the gap to 5 10 log points the single most important proximate factor that explains the gap is field of study at university

specialization then and now marriage children and the gender earnings gap across cohorts in this paper we examine the evolution of the gender gap associated with marriage and parental status comparing cohorts born between 1936 and 1985 the model of household specialization and division of labor introduced by becker posits that when forming households couples will exploit the gains from trade by having one spouse specialize in market work while the other specializes in household work given the historical advantage of men in the labor market the model predicts specialization by gender and therefore an earnings advantage for married men and an earnings disadvantage for married women is this model of specialization useful for understanding the evolution of the gender gap across generations of women and what about children academic papers have shown that wages of mothers are significantly lower than those of non mothers with similar human capital characteristics we do not attempt to build a structural model here but rather document how changing associations between marriage and earnings and between children and earnings have contributed to the gender gap in an accounting sense

bad karma or discrimination male female wage gaps among salaried workers in india summary we use nationally representative data from the employment unemployment surveys in 1999 2000 and 2009 10 to explore gender wage gaps among regular wage salaried rws workers in india both at the mean as well as along the entire wage distribution to see what happens where the gender log wage gap at the mean is 55 in 1999 2000 and 49 in 2009 10 but this change is not statistically significant the blinder oaxaca and the machado mata melly decompositions indicate that in both years the bulk of the gender wage gap is unexplained i e possibly discriminatory they also reveal that over the decade while the wage earning characteristics of women improved relative to men the discriminatory component of the gender wage gap also increased in fact in 2009 10 if women were paid like men they would have earned more than men on account of their characteristics in both years we see the existence of the sticky floor in that gender wage gaps are higher among low wage earners and lower for high wage earners over the ten year period we find that the sticky floor became stickier for rws women machado mata melly decompositions reveal that in both years women at the lower end of the wage distribution face higher discriminatory gaps compared to women at the upper end

changes in wage structure in urban india 1983 2004 a quantile regression decomposition summary this paper utilizes individual level earnings data from urban india to examine the evolution of wages during 1983 2004 across the entire wage distribution quantile regression analysis reveals that the effects of many covariates are not constant across distribution returns to secondary and tertiary education not only increased in the 1990s but also became more heterogeneous suggesting wage inequality may increase further in near future as more workers get higher education moreover the quantile regression decomposition suggests that the increase in returns has been the driving force behind the increase in wages in both the 1980s and 1990s

equal pay for equal work evidence from sweden and a comparison with norway and the u s using a new data set covering most privately employed workers in sweden we compare gender wage differences to those previously reported for norway and the u s the central finding is that the wage gap is small when comparing men and women working in the same type of occupation for the same employer segregation of men and women by occupation accounts for more of the gap in sweden than in the other two countries in all three countries we find that segregation by occupation explains more than segregation by establishment and that institutional changes over the past two decades aimed at improving the status of women had little effect on the gender wage gap jel classification j16 j71

rank regressions wage distributions and the gender gap in this paper we propose a novel rank based procedure to decompose changes in the gender wage gap into three components changes in the skill distribution changes in the wage structure and improvements in the position of women in a distribution of reference using cps data from 1979 and 1991 we perform the decomposition at each percentile of the wage distribution and show that the results are sensitive to the choice of distribution of reference male versus overall wage distribution we also find that relative wage gains of women may have been a source of increasing wage inequality among men

do employer preferences contribute to sticky floors the authors investigate the importance of employer preferences in explaining sticky floors the pattern in which women are less likely as compared to men to start to climb the job ladder the authors perform a randomized field experiment in the belgian labor market and test whether hiring discrimination based on gender is heterogeneous by whether jobs imply a promotion compared to the applicants current position the findings show that women receive 33 fewer interview invitations when they apply for jobs that imply a first promotion at the functional level by contrast the results show that their hiring chances are not significantly affected by the authority level of the job

reprint of the career dynamics of high skilled women and men evidence from sweden abstract in this paper we use matched worker firm register data from sweden to examine the career dynamics of high skill women and men specifically we track wages for up to 20 years among women and men born in the years 1960 70 who completed a university degree in business or economics these women and men have similar wages and earnings at the start of their careers but their career paths diverge substantially as they age these men and women also have substantial differences in wage paths associated with becoming a parent we look at whether firm effects account for the differences we observe between women s and men s wage profiles we document differences between the firms where men work and those where women work however a wage decomposition suggests that these differences in firm characteristics play only a small role in explaining the gender log wage gap among these workers we then examine whether gender differences in firm to firm mobility help explain the patterns in wages that we see men and women both exhibit greater mobility early in their careers but there is little gender difference in this firm to firm mobility we find that the main driver of the gender difference in log wage profiles is that men experience higher wage gains than women do both as switchers and as stayers

second order statistical discrimination abstract the low representation of female workers in elite jobs is sometimes attributed to a tail effect if the human capital distribution exhibits less variation among females than among males then even with comparable average human capital there will be fewer females in the right tail than males this paper offers an explanation for why the human capital distribution might have this property we show that the belief that the female human capital distribution has a lower variance than the male distribution can be self fulfilling in that it provides individuals with incentives to invest in human capital such that the resulting distribution exhibits exactly this characteristic if this happens fewer females are employed in high end jobs a glass ceiling effect the average productivity of female workers may at the same time be higher than that of male workers

formal but less equal gender wage gaps in formal and informal jobs in urban brazil in developing countries a large share of employees work informally and are not covered by employment protection legislation i study here how gender wage inequality differs across formal and informal jobs in brazil the raw gender wage gap is higher in informal jobs 13 compared to formal jobs 5 but i show that this difference is an artefact of different male and female selection processes first women have better observable characteristics than men and the female advantage is stronger among formal employees second men and women entering formal and informal jobs have different unobservable characteristics controlling for endogenous selection into formal vs informal jobs i find that the gender gap in wage offers is high and increases with education in formal jobs in informal jobs however estimated wage offers are the same for men and women i discuss the potential implications of these findings regarding the effect of labour market regulation on gender wage gaps

female led firms and gender wage policies using a longitudinal data set covering the period 1987 2000 the authors explore the impact of female employers and gender segregation on wages in portugal in the context of becker s 1957 taste for discrimination theory they investigate whether the gender of a firm manager affects gender wage differences they find that females benefit from higher wages in female led firms than in male led firms further when females lead the wage gap between female and male workers is reduced by 1 5 regardless of the gender composition of the workforce at the same time the higher the share of females in a firm the lower the wages overall for both female and male workers the authors results are compatible with the notion that job promotion is an important factor in wage increases the more females are mentored and promoted the less men will be however as more females in the firm compete for promotion opportunities for both females and males to be promoted diminish author s abstract

women in top incomes evidence from sweden 1971 2017 abstract using yearly register data on the full population of sweden we study gender differences in top incomes down to the top 0 01 percentile group over the period 1971 2017 we find that while women are still a minority of the top decile and typically make up a smaller share the higher up in the distribution we move their presence has steadily increased in all top groups over the past half century at the beginning of the period top income women relied more on capital incomes but the rise in the share of top women is not due to the growing importance of capital instead women have increased their presence in the top by gains in the top of labour incomes while top income men have captured most of the growth in capital incomes studying gender differences in observable characteristics we find small gender differences in some respects convergence in others but also some important remaining differences overall our results suggest that many findings in the top income literature have a clear gender component and that understanding gender equality in the top of the distribution requires studying not only earnings and labour market outcomes but also incomes from other sources as well as family circumstances

gender discrimination and compensating differentials in sweden the determinants of the unexplained component of the male female wage difference in sweden are examined the hypothesis that there is a compensating wage differential associated with undesirable job charcteristics is tested hedonic wage equations are estimated using data collected in the 1981 swedish level of living survey the estimation takes into consideration possible sample selection bias due to the non randomness takes of employment and the potential endogeneity of job choice variables in wage offer equations overall the analysis indicates that compensating wage differentials are not a major determinant of the male female wage difference in sweden

how immigrants fare across the earnings distribution in australia and the united states this paper investigates determinants of the earnings distribution for native born workers and immigrant workers in two countries the authors using data from the 2000 u s census and 2001 australian census employ a methodology quantile regression that facilitates measurement of the native born immigrant earnings differential and the partial effect of explanatory variables such as schooling and experience at each decile of the earnings distribution they find evidence that schooling and labor market experience had stronger earnings effects at higher deciles the native immigrant earnings gap varied by decile and in particular increased in the united states at higher deciles the results suggest that in the united states minimum wages compressed earnings at low deciles whereas in australia the minimum administered wage system compressed earnings across the entire distribution a pattern of higher earnings for immigrants than for the native born at the lowest earnings decile in australia may reflect favorable selectivity in migration

female employment and occupational changes in the 1990s how is the eu performing relative to the us abstract this paper provides a comparison of the incidence and composition of female employment both in the eu and in the us despite a significant increase in female labour market participation in the eu about 50 of the difference between the employment rates in the us and the eu can still be attributed to differences in the educational attainments and the employment rates of women aged 25 54 we highlight the main features of female employment in both areas paying particular attention to the differences across age cohorts and educational levels our main findings are as follows i the educational level of the eu female population is slowly converging to that of the us across age cohorts ii the employment rates of less educated women are much lower in the eu than in the us with the exceptions of the scandinavian countries even for women aged 25 34 and iii occupational segregation is lower for the younger highly educated women who seem to be entering more typically male occupations and less typically female occupations although at a higher rate in the us than in the eu

differences in wage distributions between canada and the united states an application of a flexible estimator of distribution functions in the presence of covariates we construct a tractable flexible functional form estimator of cumulative distribution functions for non negative random variables which admits large numbers of covariates the estimator adopts and extends techniques from the spell duration literature for estimating hazard functions to distribution functions for wages earnings and income we apply these methods to investigate sources of wage inequality for full time male workers between canada and the united states finding that the canadian wage density has a thinner left tail because low educated workers have higher pay and a thinner right tail because of a lower proportion of highly educated workers unions appear to play a large role in these outcomes