measuring the pay disparity between typically female occupations and other jobs a bivariate selectivity approach the author of this study using a bivariate probit selectivity model with data from the 1984 panel survey of income dynamics finds that women in female dominated jobs earned 6 15 percent less than

the crowding hypothesis and comparable worth although women s pay and occupational distribution have improved during the past few years it is still true that women earn considerably less than men and that their occupational distribution is substantially different because progress has been slow toward equality in the labor market some have called for a comparable worth policy proponents of this approach argue that occupational segregation contributes to the earnings disparity between women and men one theoretical justification for this position is the crowding hypothesis this paper first explains this theory and presents a method used to test its principal hypothesis it then describes an extension of this design for estimating the phenomenon that comparable worth policies address empirical studies conducted in this area are viewed and new findings are presented finally limitations of this analysis are discussed i introduction

effort observability and worker productivity towards an explanation of economic dualism this paper suggests an explanation of the wage and productivity differentials between formal and informal sectors in developing countries this explanation is based on differences in the observability of effort that arise from technological differences such as size of operation the authors argue that observability of effort is lower in the formal sector and then show that under reasonable conditions this leads to higher wages and higher effort productivity this is because with lower observability the marginal cost of effort is lower when existing employees are induced to work harder than when more workers are hired explanations for intersectoral differences in factor intensities and sector specific unemployment rates also follow from the authors basic assumptions copyright 1989 by royal economic society

strong versus weak ties in migration abstract this paper studies the role of strong versus weak ties in rural to urban migration decisions in china we develop a network model that puts forward the different roles of weak and strong ties in helping workers to migrate to the city we use unique longitudinal data that allow us to test our model by focusing on first time migration we address the endogeneity of weak ties using an instrumental variable procedure our results indicate that weak and strong ties provide different type of help and hence act as complements in the migration decision with the interactive effect being particularly strong above a certain threshold of weak ties

comparable worth in a decentralized labour market the case of ontario we document the application of pro active pay equity legislation to the private sector of the canadian province of ontario in the early 1990s we report substantial lapses in compliance among smaller firms where the majority of men and women work we also find that the pay equity law had no effect on aggregate wages in female jobs or on the gender wage gap this experience provides unique perspectives on 1 the tensions between the workings of a decentralized labour market and the principles of comparable worth and 2 the obstacles to its extension to the private sector jel classification j7 j3 l equite salariale dans un marche du travail decentralise le cas de l ontario les auteurs documentent l application de la loi d equite salariale mise en vigueur dans le secteur prive en ontario au debut des annees 1990 on fait etat de defaillances substantielles dans la mise en uvre de cette politique aupres des pme ou la majorite des hommes et des femmes travaillent l analyse revele que au niveau agrege la loi d equite salariale n a pas eu d effets sur les salaires dans les emplois feminins ou sur l ecart salarial entre les hommes et les femmes l experience ontarienne fournit des perspectives eclairantes sur 1 les tensions entre le fonctionnement d un marche du travail decentralise et les principes de salaire egal pour un travail de valeur comparable et 2 sur les obstacles a l extension de ces principes au secteur prive

occupational segregation and career advancement abstract this paper analyzes women s job choice in order to discriminate between different theories we model the joint determination of occupation and career advancement our results support the crowding hypothesis of occupational segregation and are against human capital and compensating wage differentials explanations

density social networks and job search methods theory and application to egypt we first develop a theoretical model in which individuals are embedded within a network of social relationships we show that conditional on being employed the probability to find a job through social networks relative to other search methods increases and is concave with the size of the network the effects are stronger for the uneducated there is however a critical size of the network above which this probability decreases we then test empirically these theoretical findings for egypt using the 1998 labor market survey the empirical evidence supports the predictions of our theoretical model

peer effects and social networks in education this paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education we first develop a model that shows that at the nash equilibrium the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her katz bonacich centrality measure this measure takes into account both direct and indirect friends of each individual but puts less weight to her distant friends we then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed dataset of adolescent friendship networks we show that after controlling for observable individual characteristics and unobservable network specific factors the individual s position in a network as measured by her katz bonacich centrality is a key determinant of her level of activity a standard deviation increase in the katz bonacich centrality increases the pupil school performance by more than 7 percent of one standard deviation

heterogeneous preferences compensating wage differentials and comparable worth this paper sets up a general equilibrium model of a world of heterogeneous jobs and heterogeneous tastes and uses the model to i analyze the effects of employer discrimination and ii predict the likely consequences of requiring equal pay for jobs of comparable worth it shows that employment of both women and men is likely to fall as a result of comparable worth it also shows that when individuals tastes are heterogeneous neither comparable worth nor the simple model of compensating differentials on which it is based provides useful insights into wage determination in particular when tastes are heterogeneous there is no reason to expect equal pay for jobs of comparable worth even in the absence of employer discrimination

psychological bias and gender wage gap basing our work on the literature on psychology that highlights differences in confidence levels between men and women we provide a rationale for the simultaneous existence of the two dimensions of the gender wage gap i on average men earn more than women and ii the difference in wages depends on the gender structure we also argue that although an equal compensation policy does not eliminate the gender wage gap it nonetheless increases social welfare finally endogenizing the choice of task by agents we show how women in a vast majority can self select on low paying jobs

how unequally has equal pay progressed since the 1970s a study of two british cohorts this paper compares the gender gap in the pay of british full time workers from two cohorts born in 1946 and 1958 and observed in their early thirties in 1978 and 1991 respectively these dates are separated by 13 years of equal pay legislation coupled with active labor market deregulation although women s human capital endowments had improved on average more than men s there may have been little improvement in the differential treatment of the average woman in full time employment when the whole distribution of female earnings was considered a general improvement in the treatment of women became apparent

job information networks neighborhood effects and inequality this paper explores the theoretical and empirical literature to examine the use by different social groups of informal sources of information provided by friends relatives and acquaintances during job search and its consequences for the job market it also addresses the role of network structure and size the resource endowments of contacts and nature of the links between contacts to explain differences in the effects of job information networks in doing so the paper also turns to the sociology literature on job information networks and provides an economic perspective on such sociological concepts as strong versus weak ties inbreeding distance from structural holes etc the paper distinguishes between models of exogenous job information networks that is where individuals obtain job related information through a given social structure and endogenous job information networks which are social networks that result from individuals uncoordinated actions the paper pays special attention to such issues as physical and social proximity and sharing of information and discusses them in the context of the recent social interactions and neighborhood effects literature finally the paper outlines a model that integrates job information networks where interactions occur in business cycle frequencies with the dynamics of human capital formation which include the joint effects of parental community and neighborhood human capital and are set in life cycle frequencies for the purpose of organizing suggestions for future research and examining earned income inequality

network effects and the dynamics of migration and inequality theory and evidence from mexico international migration is costly and initially only the middle class of the wealth distribution may have both the means and incentives to migrate which can increase inequality in the sending community however the migration networks formed lower the costs for future migrants which can in turn lower inequality this paper shows both theoretically and empirically that wealth has a nonlinear effect on migration and then examines the empirical evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship between emigration and inequality in rural sending communities in mexico after instrumenting we find that the overall impact of migration is to reduce inequality across communities with relatively high levels of past migration we also find some suggestive evidence for an inverse u shaped relationship among communities with a wider range of migration experiences

the economic consequences of social network structure we survey the literature on the economic consequences of the structure of social networks we develop a taxonomy of macro and micro characteristics of social interaction networks and discuss both the theoretical and empirical findings concerning the role of those characteristics in determining learning diffusion decisions and resulting behaviors we also discuss the challenges of accounting for the endogeneity of networks in assessing the relationship between the patterns of interactions and behaviors

labour supply household production and intra family welfare distribution abstract this paper demonstrates the importance in conceptual and empirical terms of incorporating household production in models of labour supply to avoid misleading results concerning the intra family distribution of income and behavioural responses to economic policy

an experimental study of job evaluation and comparable worth the doctrine of comparable worth rests on an assumption that each job possesses an inherent worth independent of the market forces of supply and demand implementation of comparable worth further requires that inherentjob worth be measured with reasonable accuracy this paper reports the results of an experimental study of comparable worth three commercial job evaluation firms rated the same set of 27 jobs in an actual company statistical analysis of the experimental data indicates that the three evaluators differed in which job trait or constellation of traits they used to evaluate inherent job worth implying that at least one of them failed to measure inherent job worth accurately these results suggest that any attempt to implement comparable worth may be quite sensitive to the evaluator chosen to measure job worth

climatic factors as determinants of international migration we examine environmental change as a potential determinant of international migration we distinguish between unexpected short run factors captured by natural disasters as well as long run climate change and climate variability captured by deviations and volatilities of temperatures and rainfall from and around their long run averages starting from a simple neo classical model we use a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows for the period 1960 2000 that allows us to control for numerous time varying and time invariant factors we find no direct impact of climatic change on international migration across our entire sample these results are robust when conditioning on characteristics of origin countries as well as when further considering migrants returning home and the potential endogeneity of our network variable in contrast there is evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors going through wages we further find strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs

pay differences among the highly paid the male female earnings gap in lawyers salaries this article uses very detailed information on graduates of the university of michigan law school to examine male female pay differences in that population men and women in this population have virtually identical human capital on graduation from law school allowing us to examine carefully the different impact of children and work history on men s and women s careers and earnings taking time from work in order to care for children reduces wages significantly but a rich set of controls including childcare work history school performance and job setting measures still leave one fourth to one third of the earnings gap unexplained

male female differences in hourly wages the role of human capital working conditions and housework this study uses a new data set from a 1986 survey of workers to examine simultaneously the wage effects of human capital household responsibilities working conditions and on the job training the analysis suggests that household responsibilities had a negative effect on women s earnings but the unexplained difference between the earnings of men and women is not greatly reduced by inclusion in the explanatory model of information on either housework or working conditions the presence of children appears to have had a positive effect on the wages of both men and women t wenty years of research on gender differences in earnings have failed to explain the entire wage gap as a consequence of measured differences between male and female workers some researchers view the unexplained residual as evidence of discrimination against female workers others take the position that the entire wage gap is potentially explicable by differences in labor supply according to the latter view an unexplained wage gap remains because the data sets in use do not contain adequate information on all productivity related characteristics this view implies that the unexplained wage gap will be reduced by more comprehensive infor

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

incorporating the causes of occupational differences in studies of racial wage differentials this study provides a basic framework for incorporating the causes of occupational differences into analyses of racial wage differentials separating the influences of personal characteristics occupational choice and hiring discrimination on occupational attainment provides measures of the contributions of each to the racial pay gap the paper also considers the potential for bias in the wage equation estimates arising from self selection into occupations there are two generalfindings first correcting for self selection increases the importance of occupational distribution in explaining racial wage differentials second a proper accounting of the causes of these occupational differences yields discrimination measures that are higher than those that arise when occupational dummy variables are included in the wage equations and all the difference in occupational distribution is treated as nondiscriminatory

networks in the modern economy mexican migrants in the u s labor market this paper attempts to identify job networks among mexican migrants in the u s labor market the empirical analysis uses data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin communities in mexico over a long period of time each community s network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who are located at the destination the united states in any year we verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger by including individual fixed effects in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination