risk taking and taxation an alternative perspective abstract the analysis of risk taking and taxation has almost invariably been in a portfolio choice framework this paper presents the alternative perspective of an occupational choice framework where risk taking involves the additional element of discrete choice between safe and risky activities it is shown that the specification of equilibrium must of necessity have a general equilibrium character in this setting the paper develops rules for government intervention in the market equilibrium and analyses the effects of taxation on risk taking

measuring and decomposing the gender pay gap a new frontier approach abstract the gender pay gap measures the differences in the wages earned by female workers when compared to male workers accurately measuring the gender pay gap is an important exercise in order to assess how far we are from the ideal of equal pay for work of equal value determining the different sources of the gender pay gap is also very important in order to design appropriate policies for eliminating this gap we develop an enhanced method to measure and decompose the gender pay gap this method is based on the data envelopment analysis dea technique and on the malmquist index mi we use dea and the mi to construct an index reflecting an adjusted measure of the gender pay gap taking into account multiple productive characteristics and multiple types of pay furthermore we propose a decomposition of the gender pay gap into four components same gender pay gap cross gender frontier gap magnitude productive characteristics bias and pay package bias the method is applied to data relative to 15 712 men and 17 175 women working as business and administration associate professionals in the finance and insurance industry in 20 countries the results reveal the existence of a gender pay gap in all countries and that the value of the gap and of its components vary considerably between countries requiring different policies to tackle it

the political economy of gender explaining cross national variation in the gender division of labor and the gender voting gap mainstream political economy has tended to treat the family as a unit when examining the distributional consequences of labor market institutions and of public policy in a world with high divorce rates we argue that this simplification is more likely to obscure than to instruct we find that labor market opportunities for women which vary systematically with the position of countries in the international division of labor and with the structure of the welfare state affect women s bargaining power within the family and as a result can explain much of the cross country variation in the gender division of labor as well as the gender gap in political preferences

does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

rising wage inequality and the u s gender gap the u s labor market has recently experienced two dramatic trends a falling male female pay gap and a rising level of labor market inequality after decades of near constancy at about 60 percent the ratio of women s to men s pay has risen steadily since the late 1970 s at the same time there were substantial increases in overall wage inequality for both men and women lawrence f katz and kevin m murphy 1992 blau and kahn 1993 wage inequality rose both within and between education and experience groups and this has been interpreted as reflecting primarily higher returns to both measured and unmeasured labor market skills katz and murphy 1992 chinhui juhn et al 1993 this paper addresses the connection between these two important developments when analyzing gender differentials in pay economists commonly focus on malefemale differences in skills and on differences in the treatment of equally qualified men and women i e discrimination both of these may be considered gender specific factors influencing the pay gap research on these gender specific factors suggests that women tend to be less skilled than men on average and to be located in lower paying industries and occupations this in turn suggests that overall wage structure can also have an important effect on the gender pay gap wage structure describes the array of prices set for various labor market skills measured and unmeasured and the rents received for employment in particular sectors of the economy for example since women on average have less experience than men an increase in the return to experience as in fact occurred over the 1970s and 1980s would cause the gender pay gap to rise even if women s relative level of experience and their gender specific treatment by employers remained the same similarly an increase in the returns to employment in male occupations and industries would widen the gender differential all else equal in earlier work we found overall wage inequality to be very important in explaining international differences in the gender pay gap blau and kahn 1992 1994 in particular we addressed a paradox on the one hand u s women compare favorably to those in other countries in terms of their relative qualifications and occupational status further the united states has had a longer and often stronger commitment to equal pay and equal employment policies than most other industrialized countries yet the gender pay gap in the united states is larger than in most of these countries an important part of the explanation for this pattern is the high level of wage inequality i e high returns to skill in the united states which puts an exceptionally large penalty on being below average in the wage distribution our results suggest that the u s gap would be similar to that in countries like sweden or australia the countries with the smallest gaps if the united states had their level of wage inequality the implication of our earlier research on international differences in the gender gap is that in recent years american women have been swimming upstream in a labor market that was growing increasingly unfavorable to low wage workers in the face of this rising inequality women s relative skills and treatment have to improve merely for the pay gap to remain constant still larger gains are necessary for it to be reduced blau institute of labor and industrial relations university of illinois champaign il 61820 and nber kahn institute of labor and industrial relations university of illinois we thank claudia goldin and participants at the nber labor studies meeting and the university of illinois and cornell labor economics workshops for helpful comments and jennifer berdahl for excellent research assistance portions of this work were completed while the authors were visiting fellows at the australian national university canberra

how competitiveness may cause a gender wage gap experimental evidence abstract we show that choices in competitive behavior may entail a gender wage gap in our experiments employees first choose a remuneration scheme competitive tournament vs piece rate and then conduct a real effort task employers know the pie size the employee has generated the remuneration scheme chosen and the employee s gender employers then decide how the pie will be split as in a dictator game whereas employers do not discriminate by gender when tournaments are chosen they take substantially and significantly more from female employees who choose piece rate remuneration a discriminatory wage gap occurs which cannot be attributed to employees performance

on representative social capital abstract this paper analyzes the behavior of subjects randomly drawn from the dutch population who reveal their capacity to provide and sustain social capital by their propensity to invest and reward investments in an economic experiment we find that heterogeneity in behavior is characterized by several asymmetries men the young and elderly and low educated individuals invest relatively less but reward significantly more investments the age effects are found to corroborate existing findings whereas those of gender and education do not higher expected levels of investments by others are found to have a positive and significant effect on own investments finally a laboratory experiment with student subjects is found to provide a lower bound of the population level of social capital

gendering the varieties of capitalism a study of occupational segregation by sex in advanced industrial societies this article explores the unintended gendered consequences of employment protection and vocational training systems it develops a micrologic of skill investment by workers and employers to identify the mechanism by which specific skills become disadvantageous for women the central claim of the article is that institutions that encourage male investment in specific skills exacerbate occupational sex segregation the article finds that coordinated market economies because of their robust institutional protection of male skill investments are generally more sex segregating than are liberal market economies the empirical section provides cross sectional analyses of advanced industrial countries

optimal input trade policy under economic uncertainties in a small open economy this article theoretically analyses optimal input trade policy under economic uncertainties in a small open economy the benchmark model explains both key business cycle moments and asset prices of

occupational attainment and gender earnings differentials in mexico women earned about 20 8 less than men in mexico in 1987 a difference that increased to 22 0 by 1993 using 1987 93 data from mexico s national urban employment survey the authors study the role of occupational attainment in this wage differential most of the 1987 93 increase in the gender log monthly earnings gap they find can be explained by relative chnges in human capital endowments wage coefficient changes would have slightly reduced the gap all else equal the increasing male female earnings differential was tempered by a substantial decline in gender differences in occupational attainment from 1987 to 1993 most of the male female differences in earnings in both 1987 and 1993 can be explained by differences in rewards to individual endowments rather than gender differences in endowments

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

stochastic trade policy with asset markets abstract this paper uses a stockman dellas type two country two good stochastic general equilibrium model to consider the effects of commercial policy when asset markets are complete we show that i import and export tariffs do not have symmetric effects because interstate relative prices depend on the entire tariff structure ii when commercial policy is random and exogenously determined the ex post comparison of utility across states depends upon whether import or export tariffs are used and iii when endowments are random implying the optimal tariff varies across states the introduction of asset markets may be welfare reducing when only import tariffs are used

minority advantage and disadvantage in competition and coordination abstract we explore how a minority advantage or disadvantage endogenously arises in two contrasting environments a population comprises two unequally sized groups each individual allocates effort between a majority skill and a minority skill it is cheaper to invest in the skill of one s own group individuals are subsequently pairwise matched in an environment that encourages either competition or coordination we find both theoretically and experimentally that under competition the minority players earn more than the majority players when the share of the minority group is sufficiently small as players acquire more of the majority skill to maximize the chance of winning against a majority opponent moreover when there are no theoretical predictions for a relatively large share of the minority we find experimentally that the minority players still enjoy an advantage and the advantage is smaller under coordination in contrast payoffs are reversed both theoretically and experimentally players are more likely to coordinate on the majority skill and this yields a minority disadvantage the minority disadvantage grows with the imbalance in the size of the two groups

measuring over education previous work on over education has assumed homogeneity of workers and jobs relaxing these assumptions we find that over educated workers have lower education credentials than matched graduates among the over educated graduates we distinguish between the apparently over educated workers who have similar unobserved skills as matched graduates and the genuinely over educated workers who have a much lower skill endowment over education is associated with a pay penalty of 5 11 for apparently over educated workers compared with matched graduates and of 22 26 for the genuinely over educated over education originates from the lack of skills of graduates this should be taken into consideration in the current debate on the future of higher education in the uk

the gender gap in pay in company boards the aim of this study is to analyze whether a gender wage gap exists in the boards of directors bd of companies listed on the madrid stock exchange from 2004 to 2011 we hypothesize that the percentage of female directors on a bd the presence of female directors on the nomination and compensation committee the presence of well qualified independent women directors on bd the sector and the geographical region have an effect on the gender wage gap the results show that the percentage of female directors on a bd and the geographical region have no effect on the gender wage gap on the other hand the finding reports that women s presence on the nomination and compensation committee increases the gender gap in pay and it is reduced when there are independent female directors who have gained a degree on the bd and when the company operates in the finance and real estate services sector in addition the results also demonstrate that the seniority of the female directors decreases the gender gap in pay while there is a rise when the companies are bigger and the size of the bd and the return on assets increase these conclusions should encourage regulatory bodies to adopt forceful rules to mitigate the gender gap in pay

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

a comparative analysis of the nativity wealth gap this paper investigates the source of the gap in the relative wealth posi tion of immigrant households residing in australia germany and the united states our results indicate that in germany and the united states wealth difierentials are largely the result of disparity in the educational attainment and demographic composition of the native and immigrant populations while income difierentials are relatively unimportant in understanding the nativity wealth gap in contrast the relatively small wealth gap between australian and foreign born households exists because immigrants to australia do not translate their relative educational and demographic advantage into a wealth advantage on balance our results point to substantial cross national disparity in the economic well being of immigrant and native families which is largely consistent with domestic labor markets and the selection policies used to shape the nature of the immigration ow

restricted stock markets in simple general equilibrium models with production uncertainty it is shown that in a two sector production model with uncertainty analogous to work of batra and sakai there exists an implicit and arbitrarily restricted stock market interpretation of the model and that the appropriate duality lies between the relation of factor endowments and equity outputs and the relation of factor prices and equity prices these observations permit a generalization of the batra sakai assumption of maximization of expected utility of profits this is accompanied by an extensive characterization of the implicit market and several of its comparative statics properties a 2 2 2 2 joint production formulation is developed to examine stability properties

trade taxes and the current account abstract we show that under some conditions a temporary import tariff improves the current account whereas a temporary export tax deteriorates it permanent import tariffs and export taxes have an identical although ambiguous effect on the current account

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

equal pay as a moving target international perspectives on forty years of addressing the gender pay gap this paper provides an overview of the key factors impacting upon the gender pay gap in the uk europe and australia forty years after the implementation of the first equal pay legislation the pay gap remains a key aspect of the inequalities women face in the labour market while the overall pay gap has tended to fall in many countries over the past forty years it has not closed in some countries it has been stubbornly resistant or has even widened in reviewing the collection of papers that make up this special issue we identify four broad themes with which to group the contributions and draw out the explanations for diverse trends theoretical and conceptual debates legal developments and their impacts wage setting institutions and changing employer demands and newly emerging pay inequalities between and within educational and ethnic groups across the four themes we underline how the trends in the gender pay gap capture the dynamism of inequalities as the market power of different groups and stakeholders changes over times three key dimensions emerge from the papers to provide a framework for future research and policy discourse the relationship between litigation and bargaining strategies the interaction between wage setting institutions and new organisational practices and the increasing and range of diversity or equality strands competing for equal treatment we conclude that progress towards closing the gender pay gap will not be easy will require a collective effort of various actors and will not be quick

international trade and incomplete markets trade theorists since the influential paper by helpman and razin 1978 have considered the impact of uncertainty and international trade in securities from the point of view of available risk markets helpman and razin elegantly showed that in a model with multiplicative production uncertainty the validity of the traditional theorems of international trade follows from the existence of domestic securities markets and international trade in securities under their assumptions output was written

panel estimates of the earnings gap in norway do female immigrants experience a double earnings penalty this study explores the possibility that being both a female and an immigrant will impose an earnings disadvantage on immigrant women in norway well known techniques are used to decompose the earnings gap between norwegian men and immigrant women into portions attributable to productivity differentials portions attributable to a gender effect and portions attributable to an ethnic effect the analysis supports the following conclusions first there is evidence of a double negative effect on female immigrant earnings second gender effect is more important than ethnic effect finally the discrimination estimates are robust to the alternative methods used in decomposing norwegian men immigrant women earnings gap

decomposing wage residuals unmeasured skill or statistical artifact the decomposition of wage residuals into standard deviation and percentile ranks can be misleading because the two measures are not necessarily independent with rising wage inequality the mean percentile rank of low wage groups will rise simply because more dispersed distributions have thicker tails this interpretation is consistent with the observed stability of gender and racial wage gaps in contrast the unmeasured skill interpretation of wage residuals would predict widening wage gaps in the face of rising wage inequality unless one posits an increase in the level of unobserved skill for women and blacks

the family gap for young women in the united states and britain can maternity leave make a difference in the united states and britain there is a family gap between the wages of mothers and other women differential returns to marital and parental status explain 40 50 of the gender gap another 30 40 is explained by women s lower levels of work experience and lower returns to experience taking advantage of quasi experiments in job protected maternity leave in the united states and britain this article finds that women who had leave coverage and returned to work after childbirth received a wage premium that offset the negative wage effects of children

commercial policy variability bindings and market access abstract protection unconstrained by rules often varies substantially over time rules based disciplines such as wto tariff bindings and bindings on market access in services constrain this variability we examine the theoretical effects of such constraints on the expected cost of protection and offer a formalization of the concept of market access emphasizing both the first and second moments of the distribution of protection as an illustration we provide a stylized examination of uruguay round bindings on wheat

declining bias and gender wage discrimination a meta regression analysis this paper extends tests and revises a previous meta regression analysis of the gender wage gap stanley and jarrell 1998 we find that there remains a strong though dampened tendency for discrimination estimates to fall and male researchers still report significantly larger amounts of wage discrimination against women this extensive research base containing 104 estimates suggests that there is less need to correct for selection bias an indirect sign of lessened discrimination there is evidence that gender research is changing and improving although gender wage discrimination has lessened the research base still finds a significant gender wage inequality

the gender wage gap a comparison of australia and canada using data from the 1989 canadian labour market activity survey and for australia the 1989 90 income distribution survey the authors investigate the reasons for the significantly lower gender wage gap in australia than in canada key similarities and differences between these two countries the authors argue make them a good basis for a natural experiment to investigate the effects of different labor market institutions in particular australia has a stronger union movement and a greater degree of centralization in wage determination than canada and most of its workers are covered by legally binding minimum working conditions the authors conclude that several differences between the countries in labor market structure notably a lower rate of return to education a lower rate of return to labor market experience and a lower level of wage inequality in australia than in canada are largely responsible for the smaller gender wage gap in australia

gender wage differentials and educational mismatch an application to the spanish case this article aims to analyse gender wage differentials in spain by taking into account the levels of educational attainment and by studying whether the educational mismatch affects the gender wage gap focusing on returns to education evidence is found on the existence of educational mismatch and on its contribution to determine wages with women suffering greater wage penalties that are associated with educational mismatch furthermore although the gender wage gap is lower for individuals with low educational levels we find that the part of this gap due to differences in returns is greater in this group on the contrary the gender gap is greater among highly educated workers but in this case most of the wage differentials are due to differences in productive characteristics in any case our results suggest that gender wage discrimination tends to be greater for those workers who show educational mismatch

constant increasing and decreasing risk aversion with many commodities the arrow 1971 pratt 1964 theory of risk aversion has achieved important successes in the study of economic responses to risk this theory applies to a special class of cases in which the von neumann morgenstern expected utility hypothesis is used to explain these responses under this hypothesis individuals who maximize the expected utility of different utility functions will in general make different choices in the face of uncertainty for the purpose of predicting which of two different utility functions will lead to locally more risk averse economic behaviour the essential feature of these functions is their associated arrow pratt absolute risk aversion measures in fact the local comparisons can be extended to global comparisons if the arrow pratt absolute measures are uniformly comparable the arrow pratt measure of absolute risk aversion and a closely related measure of relative risk aversion also play crucial roles in the investigation of changes induced by wealth increases in the risk taking behaviour of a single expected utility maximizing individual this study has resulted in a satisfactory theory of increasing decreasing and constant absolute and relative risk aversion the special cases to which the arrow pratt theory is directly applicable are those in which the utility functions in question are functions of a single variable e g wealth unfortunately the models required to explain many economic decisions employ a version of the expected utility hypothesis in which the argument of the utility function is a multidimensional vector one example arises in the study of the consumption savings decision another occurs in the analysis of the combined consumption savings portfolio decision a final example is obtained in the investigation of demand for goods of uncertain quality the papers of kihlstrom mirman 1974 and diamond stiglitz 1974 have suggested a partial generalization of the arrow pratt theory of absolute risk aversion this

convergence in the gender wage gap in australia over the 1980s identifying the role of counteracting forces via the juhn murphy and pierce decomposition the paper utilises the juhn murphy and pierce 1991 decomposition to shed light on the pattern of slow male female wage convergance in australia over the 1980s the analysis allows one to distinguish between the role of wage structure and genderspecific effects the central question addressed is whether rising wage inequality counteracted the forces of increased female investment in labour market skills i e education and experience the conclusion is that in contrast to the us and the uk australian women do not appear to have been swimming against a tide of adverse wage structure changes

a note on the protective effect of tariffs and quotas under uncertainty abstract sufficient conditions are given for any tariff or quota to be protective under uncertainty where assets are not traded internationally and commodities are traded it is shown that if both goods are normal goods then any small tariff or quota is protective even if it varies with the random state of nature a sufficient condition is also given for large trade restrictions to be protective under uncertainty these results thus generalize those of helpman and razin who showed that when both goods are normal goods a small ad valorem tariff which is independent of the state of nature is protective

the effects of competition and equal treatment laws on gender wage differentials discrimination if it is inefficient can be eliminated by competition in most countries it is also forbidden by law this paper evaluates the influence of economic and legal factors on the portion of male female wage differentials that is not explained by other worker characteristics and may be due to discrimination we use a new international data set of suitable gender wage gap measures constructed from the results of existing studies meta analysis of the data shows that increased competition and adoption of international conventions concerning equal treatment laws both reduce gender wage gaps while legislation that prevents women from performing strenuous or dangerous jobs tends to increase it doris weichselbaumer and rudolf winter ebmer

the heckscher ohlin and travis vanek theorems under uncertainty abstract the heckscher ohlin theorem is valid under uncertainty of the special benchmark sort modelled by helpman razin their pessimism over its validity is vanquished by more structure rational expectations are imposed on consumers and identical and constant relative aversion to income risk is assumed under these circumstances with free commodity trade the heckscher ohlin theorem holds for the international exchange of equities

asset markets tariffs and political risk abstract this paper examines a simple model in which exogenous political risk creates uncertainty about tariffs the model predicts a relation between consumption and tariffs that differs radically from that implied by models without asset markets or political risk given the probability distribution of tariffs domestic consumption and utility ex post are lower in states of the world with a domestic tariff and no foreign tariff than with a foreign tariff and no domestic tariff this conclusion emerges despite the fact that the opposite would be obtained in the absence of asset markets so economists should not be surprised if observed relations between consumption and tariffs differ from the predictions of static theory in either time series or cross sections

contradictions and misalignments in the eu approach towards the gender pay gap the aim of this paper is to highlight the tensions within the eu s governance architecture concerning pay equality specifically after a preliminary outline of the theoretical discussion on the eu s new old governance the analysis focuses on two empirical fields the first one enables an assessment of the contradictions between old and new governance in eu equal pay policy this analysis highlights the inconsistencies between the architecture of the antidiscrimination framework established following the eu s old governance by law approach and the assessment of equal pay public policy measures in the context of the eu s new governance by numbers approach to this extent the problems related to the political use of the unadjusted gender pay gap gpg indicator are pointed out the second empirical field enables an assessment of the tensions within the eu s new governance system itself specifically between the approach in the area of equal pay and in the area of economic policy with specific regard to the participatory role of the social partners in tackling the gpg if the role of the social partners is emphasised in several policy documents the potentialities of their action are seriously jeopardised by the push for decentralisation of collective bargaining aimed at anchoring wages to productivity fostered by the eu s governance reforms responding to the crisis in particular by the euro plus pact and by the six pack regulations of 2011 as the paper finally remarks both empirical fields of investigation confirm a narrowing down of pay equality in the context of an eu flexibility centred and neoliberalist political perspective

the anatomy of distributional preferences with group identity abstract the increasing diversity of societies raises questions about the consequences for redistributive preferences this paper assesses the impact of social identity on distributional preferences in a modified dictator game i estimate individual level utility functions with two parameters that govern the trade offs between equity and efficiency and giving to self and to other subjects on average put less weight on income of the out group the out group treatment also changes the distribution of equity efficiency concerns however the experiment also uncovers a large individual heterogeneity of preferences an analysis of garp violations reveals that choices in both treatments overwhelmingly stem from well behaved yet systematically different underlying utility functions hence the evidence presented here suggests that the rational choice approach is a useful tool for understanding the effect of social identity on preferences

dynamic stability and international trade under uncertainty in the presence of output or price uncertainty the heckscher ohlin samuelson h o s model with incomplete risk markets has been shown to exhibit a wide range of perverse comparative statics responses which contradict the predictions d la stolper samuelson and rybczynski and opens up the possibility of perverse price output responses this paper revisits the question raised by neary 1978 and examines the dynamic stability properties of an h o s model under uncertainty in relation to the conditions under which these perverse responses emerge the findings suggest that once the risk attitudes of the representative entrepreneur is appropriately accounted for in the specification of value factor intensities dynamic stability with respect to a marshallian adjustment process is necessary and sufficient for the normality of all of the standard comparative statics responses except for the rybczynski result the basic analytics are then applied to various existing setups of the h o s model under uncertainty in each case the applicability of the stability condition in precluding comparative static responses that violate standard predictions is examined

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

is the gender wage gap declining in the netherlands in this paper i try to answer the question whether the gender wage gap in the netherlands is declining i posed this question because on several other indicators labour market differences between men and women in the netherlands declined or disappeared altogether first of all the labour market participation of women has increased and women on the labour market are no longer a small minority second the difference in productive characteristics between men and women is disappearing third both product and labour markets have become increasingly competitive due to changes in regulation like anti trust laws which should have an effect on the gender wage gap contrary to these expectations i did not find a declining gender wage gap the data in dutch institute for labour studies osa labour supply panel show a steady gender gap of approximately nineteen per cent at most twenty five to thirty per cent of the gap can be explained by productivity differences the largest part of the gender wage gap is due

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

black white wage inequality in the 1990s a decade of progress mary c daly using current population survey data we find that the gap between the wages of black and white males declined during the 1990s at a rate of about 60 percentage point per year wage convergence was most rapid among workers with less than 10 years of potential experience with declines in the gap averaging 1 40 percentage points per year using standard decomposition methods we find that greater occupational diversity and reductions in unobserved or residual differences are important in explaining this trend general wage inequality tempered the rate of wage convergence between blacks and whites during the 1990s jel j15 j31 i introduction following the passage of the civil rights act of 1964 and other measures aimed at reducing labor market discrimination during the 1960s the differential in average weekly wages between black and white men in the united states narrowed substantially among male workers aged 18 64 the black white wage gap fell from 50 in 1967 to 30 in 1974 or by about 1 per year 1 after 1974 however the proportional difference in black and white wages remained essentially constant at 30 through the end of the 1980s following more than a decade of stasis the black white wage gap once again began to decline during the 1990s narrowing at an average annual rate of about 60 percentage point per year a great deal of past research has focused on why the black white wage gap did not continue to decline following the initial progress made through the mid 1970s see for example bound and freeman 1992 and juhn et al 1991 hereafter jmp the results point to a number of important factors including shifts in industry demand greater occupational crowding relative deterioration of unobservable skills among blacks and rising overall male wage inequality see altonji and blank 1999 for a detailed review of this literature in this article we investigate the role that each of these factors played in the wage convergence observed in the 1990s we begin by documenting the recent progress in black white wage convergence placing the 1990s in the context of the past 30 years following previous researchers we then use standard decomposition techniques to examine the role of individual characteristics the employment structure and overall male wage inequality in reducing the racial gap in earnings during the decade of the 1990s we find that greater occupational diversity and reductions in unobserved or residual differences are important in explaining this trend general wage inequality tempered the rate of wage convergence between blacks and whites during the 1990s ii data we use data from the march current population survey cps for the years 1969 1999 as administered by the u s census bureau for the u s bureau of labor statistics these files provide information on earnings hours and related variables for the calendar year prior to the survey date thus our analyses apply to income years 1968 1998 in the formal decomposition analysis we focus on three periods 1968 1979 1979 1989 and 1989 1998 these years span our sample and generally coincide with three business cycles our sample consists of black and white males ages 18 64 who participated in the labor force at least 39 weeks worked at least 1 week during the year and usually worked full time workers who are enrolled in school are excluded from the analysis throughout the analysis we focus on two groups our full sample and men with less than ten years of potential experience i e min age education 6 age 18 2 our empirical analysis focuses on weekly earnings calculated as the ratio of annual earnings to weeks worked during the year weekly earnings are deflated using the personal consumption expenditure deflator from the national income and product accounts to avoid problems associated with changes in cps top coding procedures over the years our sample excludes individuals in the top and bottom 1 of the weekly earnings distribution

the optimal tariff production lags and time consistency the optimal tariff for a large country equals the reciprocal of the foreign export elasticity of supply however if production decisions occur before consumption decisions the ex ante optimal tariff is not time consistent because the ex post elasticity is less than the ex ante elasticity we show all countries are worse off if the large country cannot precommit to its ex ante optimal tariff and that all countries can gain if the large country taxes domestic production of importables

towards a gendering of the labour market regulation debate gender equality has become an issue in the labour market regulation debate now that evidence suggests that regulation is not always a barrier to good employment performance recent contributions have focused on its impact in exacerbating within workforce inequalities including gender inequality this article reveals that the evidence supporting this proposition is thin and inconclusive and questions the search for a cross national relationship between regulations and gender this approach leaves out of consideration the differences in institutional interactions in specific national contexts and the differences in the institution of gender across time and space this critique is developed through more detailed and context specific analyses of interactions between gender and six areas of labour market regulation the article concludes by arguing that simply introducing a general gender variable into non gendered analyses of labour markets misleads more than informs and distracts from the development of regulations to promote gender equality copyright the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

bayesian learning in an infant industry model abstract most analyses of the infant industry argument assume that production early on benefits subsequent production in deterministic fashion this paper presents an alternative framework for evaluating the infant industry argument that focuses on imperfect information as a barrier to entry initial entrants provide information of social value by reducing uncertainty for potential followers about the suitability of local conditions in contrast to earlier work i show that factors that increase the informational barrier to entry may lower the optimal subsidy to the infant industry and that the standard test of the success of infant industry policy is not always valid 1997 elsevier science b v

discrimination in the labor market the curse of competition between workers in an experiment we identify a crucial factor that determines whether employers engage in statistical discrimination of ex ante equal groups in the standard no competition setup of coate and loury 1993 we do not nd systematic evidence for statistical discrimination when we introduce competition between workers of dierent groups for the same job the non discrimination equilibrium ceases to be stable in line with this theoretical observation we nd systematic discrimination in the experimental treatment with competition nevertheless a substantial minority of the employers refuses to discriminate even when it is in their best interest to do so

employers discriminatory behavior and the estimation of wage discrimination this paper considers the linkage of empirical estimates of wage discrimination between two groups introduced by oaxaca 1973 to a theoretical model of employers discriminatory behavior it is shown that conditional on different assumptions about employers discriminatory tastes oaxaca s estimators of wage discrimination can be derived that the approach is more generally useful is demonstrated by deriving an alternative estimator of wage discrimination based on the assumption that within each type of labor e g unskilled skilled the utility function capturing employers discriminatory tastes is homogeneous of degree zero with respect to labor inputs from each of the two groups the estimators are compared empirically in an application to male female wage differentials

a reexamination of the neoclassical trade model under uncertainty abstract this paper presents a model that pinpoints the exact places and reasons that the propositions of the heckscher ohlin samuelson model break down under uncertainty within the model if preferences exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion i a capital poor country tends to obtain lower revenues from its resources than the same resources would yield in capital rich countries ii if there is one riskless and one risky sector a capital abundant country tends to have a comparative advantage in the risky sector and iii the pattern of trade depends on the intra national as well as the inter national distribution of endowments

spot market risk market interaction and the protective effects of a tariff under uncertainty this paper discusses the interaction between commodity spot prices and secu rity risk prices in determining the effectiveness of a protective tariff the problem i address is that of an open economy facing price and production uncertainty in trade and having access to a securities market where claims to firms are traded such a description applies for example to europe japan the united states and many of the nations in africa and latin america for these economies security prices determine industry supply decisions through their effect on market value the paper therefore describes how risk prices are formed as distinct from commodity prices and describes their influence on tariff effectiveness in conjunction with spot prices the model is the standard two sector heckscher ohlin model of trade except that i introduce an explicit financial sector in the market for firm securities and allow for technological uncertainty of the form

women in transition changes in gender wage differentials in eastern europe and the former soviet union under state socialism women fared relatively well in the labor market female male wage differentials were similar to those in the west and female labor force participation rates were among the h

the 40 year pursuit of equal pay a case of constantly moving goalposts progress towards equal pay is elusive this article reviews debates on and prescribed remedies for gender pay equality over the past 40 years of equal pay policy it looks at pay from four perspectives the economic the sociological the institutional and the organisational and explores how and why once an apparent remedy for unequal pay is pursued the goalposts tend to shift the argument is made that the difficulties in securing long term progress may be attributed to a number of factors including the multifaceted nature of pay as a social phenomenon the challenge of pursuing social objectives in a rapidly changing and fragmenting environment the need for political will not technical solutions to achieve redistribution and the potential for gender inequalities to re emerge in new forms

the gender wage gap among phds in the uk this article analyses the gender wage gap gwg among phd graduates in the uk 42 months after their graduation in 2004 5 we find a sizeable overall gwg of 19 log percentage points which is explained by a large wage premium for men outside academia compared to women and men in academia the gwg in academia is small in comparison whilst the gwg outside academia is very high six months after graduation and remains largely unaltered the gwg inside academia doubles in the following three years the oaxaca decomposition suggests that for this relatively homogeneous group the gwg cannot be explained by differences in endowments university and employment characteristics we find stark differences in wage patterns between the fields of study and a strongly increasing coefficient effect for higher quantiles

labor market discrimination against hispanic and black men h ispanic american men have lower average wage rates than white non hispanics in 1975 the average white non hispanic male wage earner in the united states earned 5 97 an hour mexican men earned 4 31 72 as much as white non hispanics puerto rican men earned 4 52 76 as much and cuban men earned 5 33 89 as much as white non hispanics by way of comparison black men s average wages in 1975 were 4 65 78 of the white male wage several possible reasons for the hispanics lower wages come to mind among them are age and education geographic location immigration language difficulties and discrimination for example as shown in table 1 mexicans and puerto ricans are younger on average than the white non hispanic population and earnings tend to rise with age hispanics have lower average levels of education than white non hispanics and wages are positively associated with education many mexican americans live in the southwest where prices are relatively low moreover hispanics are more likely to be recent immigrants and to lack fluency in english than white non hispanics and so to be at a disadvantage in the labor market in addition there is a widespread belief that hispanics suffer from employment discrimination and cannot obtain the wages that their human capital would command if they were non hispanic whites how much of the wage differentials described above are due to each of these factors and to other inter group differences in wage related characteristics in particular how much impact does labor market discrimination have on the average hispanic man s wage and how does this compare with discrimination against blacks this paper provides answers to these questions a few other efforts have been made to analyze the relative earnings of hispanic and white nonhispanic men using 1960 and 1970 census data fogel 1966 poston and alvirez 1973 poston alvirez and tienda 1976 long 1977 and gwartney and long 1978 we use more recent data from the 1976 survey of income and education this data set enables us to measure wage rates more accurately and to specify the wage function more completely than does the census unlike previous analysts in estimating the wage function we take account of possible selectivity bias due to the distinction between average wage offers and average observed wages thus we hope to obtain a more accurate and up to date measure of labor market discrimination against hispanic men section ii explains the method used to separate the minority white non hispanic wage differential into the portions due to differences in average characteristics and the portion due to differences in unobserved factors and discrimination taking into account the possibility of selectivity bias in the observed wage sample section iii describes the data used in the study and the specification of the wage equation the breakdown of the observed wage differentials into components due to differences in participation in the wage and salary sector local price levels average characteristics and discrimination are presented in section iv section v summarizes our findings and discusses their implications for efforts to improve the economic situation of hispanics in the united states

on the roles of international financial markets and their relevance for economic policy a general equilibrium approach to international finance and macroeconomics has been developed recent work associated with this development provides useful tools for interpreting evidence and evaluating alternative policy options important issues to which these advances have been applied include the choice of an exchange rate system the high variability of exchange rates the effects of budget deficits sterilized foreign exchange market intervention and monetary and fiscal policies the causes and consequences of large and variable current account deficits or surpluses and their connections with exchange rates and the development of more open and sophisticated international financial markets copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

robots computers and the gender wage gap abstract we analyze the effects of two automation technologies industrial robots and computing equipment on the gender wage gap in us local labor markets between 1990 and 2015 we find distinct impact of robot and computer capital an increase in robots decreases male wage more than female wage whereas an increase in computers reduces female wage more than male wage according to our estimates one additional unit of robot per thousand workers reduces gender wage gap by 0 3 log points and by contrast an increase in computer capital by one million dollars per thousand workers increases gender wage gap by 4 1 log points

trade patterns under uncertainty with country specific shocks the helpman razin model of international trade under uncertainty is extended to allow for country specific productivi ty shocks it is shown that for the multiple sector multiple factor case there exists a set of interesting sufficient conditions under w hich it is possible to predict the pattern of international trade in securities goods and factor content on the basis of cross country d ifferences in factor endowments it is shown that under these circum stances some well known empirical tests have to be modified copyright 1988 by the econometric society

the gender gap in earnings an international comparison with european matched employer employee data this article examines the origin of the cross country heterogeneity of the gender wage gap in nine european countries using a unique harmonized international matched employer employee dataset our novel findings suggest that cross country differences in the intensity of female segregation into low paying workplaces is a relevant source of international differences in the size of the gap and that international disparities in the characteristics of wage structures are not very influential on the other hand the evidence is not fully conclusive with respect to the influence on the variations of the gap of different macroeconomic social and institutional country specific features considered previously in the literature

explaining black white wage convergence 1940 1950 during the 1940s racial differences in wages narrowed at an unusually rapid pace using a decomposition technique different from that of previous studies the author shows that wage compression be

the good the bad and the different can gender quotas raise the quality of politicians the debate over political gender quotas is unduly confined to a supposed trade off between diversity and competence we characterize the effects of a political gender quota in a citizen candidate model to find that quotas do increase the overall quality of those elected whenever the rewards from public office are high or the skill premium or political gender discrimination are sufficiently low in such cases high skill women candidates run for office in sufficiently high numbers driving off low skill male and female candidates our model compares quotas with other policies in terms of their impact on the number and quality of those elected

sales taxes and internet commerce we estimate the sensitivity of internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using ebay data our first approach exploits the fact that a seller s location and therefore the applicable tax rate is revealed only after a buyer has expressed interest in an item we document how adverse tax surprises reduce the likelihood of purchase and shift subsequent purchases toward out of state sellers we then use more aggregated data to estimate that every one percentage point increase in a state s sales tax increases online purchases by state residents by almost 2 percent while decreasing their online purchases from state retailers by 3 4 percent jel h71 l81 l86

the payment of public sector workers in the uk reconciliation with north american findings abstract in common with recent north american evidence the highest wage premiums for uk public sector workers are found in the lower tail of the wage distribution evidence of public sector underpayment at the opposite extreme of the earnings spectrum is also apparent

gender pay gaps and the restructuring of graduate labour markets in southern europe in this article we investigate whether education job mismatches and growing occupational diversity are important explanatory factors of gender pay gaps amongst university graduates in southern europe namely in portugal spain and italy we use standard decomposition techniques and test the implications of controlling for selection bias our results indicate that over education and greater occupational segregation associated with the emergence of new graduate job profiles are important determinants of earnings inequality whilst our focus is on graduates early careers demonstrating that occupational assignment and selection into employment shape gender pay gaps amongst the highly skilled provides a more pessimistic view on the ability of educational expansion or equal pay legislation to significantly reduce gender pay inequality southern european economies are also particularly interesting to look at since there may be a greater degree of mismatch between the pace of higher education expansion and the changes in the job structure making women particularly vulnerable to over education

discrimination in the laboratory a meta analysis of economics experiments abstract economists are increasingly using experiments to study and measure discrimination between groups in a meta analysis containing 441 results from 77 studies we find groups significantly discriminate against each other in roughly a third of cases discrimination varies depending upon the type of group identity being studied it is stronger when identity is artificially induced in the laboratory than when the subject pool is divided by ethnicity or nationality and higher still when participants are split into socially or geographically distinct groups in gender discrimination experiments there is significant favouritism towards the opposite gender there is evidence for both taste based and statistical discrimination tastes drive the general pattern of discrimination against out groups but statistical beliefs are found to affect discrimination in specific instances relative to all other decision making contexts discrimination is much stronger when participants are asked to allocate payoffs between passive in group and out group members students and non students appear to discriminate equally we discuss possible interpretations and implications of our findings

globalization and gender wage inequality in china summary this paper uses an enterprise population level dataset to investigate the link between globalization and gender inequality in the chinese labor market we find that foreign and exporting firms employ more female workers than domestic nonexporters foreign participation and export orientation within the same region and industry significantly encourage female employment and reduce the gender wage gap furthermore we show that while a large gender wage gap exists for foreign and exporting firms it mainly reflects the difference in gender productivity gender wage discrimination is observed only among private nonexporting firms overall our results highlight the importance of globalization in encouraging female employment and reducing gender discrimination

statistical discrimination and growth should we subsidize discriminated against workers abstract we analyze the effects on growth of alternative government policies intended to eliminate statistical discrimination in wages we assume that the population is divided into two differenciable groups of individuals who have the same productivity but different probabilities of quitting the labor market we show that a transfer system whose aim is offsetting wage discrimination increases the growth rate

the macroeconomic effects of trade tariffs revisiting the lerner symmetry result abstract we study the robustness of the lerner symmetry result in an open economy new keynesian model with price rigidities while the lerner symmetry result i e the absence of allocative and trade flow effects of an equally sized change in import tariff and export subsidy holds up approximately for a number of alternative assumptions we obtain quantitatively important long term deviations under complete international asset markets direct pass through of tariffs and subsidies to prices and slow exchange rate adjustment can also generate significant short term deviations from lerner deviations from symmetry however do not necessarily imply an impact on global output and are often limited to a redistribution of production and consumption across countries finally we quantify the macroeconomic costs of a trade war and find that they can be substantial with permanently lower income and trade volumes however a fully symmetric retaliation to an unilaterally imposed border adjustment tax can prevent any sizable adverse real or nominal effects

the short term and long term deterrence effects of ins border and interior enforcement on undocumented immigration abstract this paper analyzes the short term and long term deterrence effects of ins border and interior enforcement utilizing fy1983 fy1997 border and interior apprehensions and patrol hours data from the ins we estimate a four variable var model and find that border patrol enforcement has significant short term deterrence effects these effects are short lived as undocumented migrants seemingly adjust to new information moreover the non existent long term effects are apparently the consequence of basic economic fundamentals our analysis employing microdata from both mexico and the us suggests that the wage gap between mexico and the us is sufficiently large to maintain the illegal migratory flow

earnings inequality in spain new evidence using tax data we use tax files from 2004 to 2010 to document the recent evolution of earnings inequality in spain we find that inequality went in parallel with the evolution of the unemployment rate during the period this evolution is consistent with the evidence from social security records recently documented in bonhomme and hospido 2012 quantitatively the 90 10 percentile ratio of daily earnings experienced a 10 increase between 2007 and 2010 which is partly but not fully explained by changes in labour force composition we also use the tax data to study the evolution of the gender earnings gap and find that it has decreased throughout the distribution during the period lastly we tentatively exploit the panel dimension of the data to explore the permanent and temporary dimensions of spanish inequality