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

puttin on the ritz pre ipo enlistment of prestigious affiliates as deadline induced remediation we describe two theoretical explanations for the amount pace and costs of the prestige enhancement a firm engages in during the year before its initial public offering the snowball model captures well known processes whereby prestige rich organizations accumulate even more prestige the dressing up model builds upon deadline induced remediation a phenomenon not previously studied in a macro organizational context in 242 software ipos the snowball model substantially explains final year prestigious hiring but there is also strong evidence of a tandem dressing up process as the final year counts down prestige poor firms aggressively hire prestigious executives and directors and pay higher prices to do so

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

giving money to get money how ceo stock options and ceo equity enhance ipo valuations recent research has suggested that stock options and equity ownership have different motivational implications for executive risk taking we examined investors reactions to the differing incentive

better together signaling interactions in new venture pursuit of initial external capital after new ventures have exhausted the limited financial resources of founders family and friends they often pursue initial external capital to secure investment entrepreneurs can signal about

what do entrepreneurs pay for venture capital affiliation this study empirically evaluates the certification and value added roles of reputable venture capitalists vcs using a novel sample of entrepreneurial start ups with multiple financing offers i analyze financing offers made by competing vcs at the first professional round of start up funding holding characteristics of the start up fixed offers made by vcs with a high reputation are three times more likely to be accepted and high reputation vcs acquire start up equity at a 10 14 discount the evidence suggests that vcs extra financial value may be more distinctive than their functionally equivalent financial capital these extra financial services can have financial consequences a central issue for early stage high tech entrepreneurs is obtaining external resources when the assets of their start up are intangible and knowledge based particularly for entrepreneurs without an established reputation convincing external resource providers such as venture capitalists vcs to provide financial capital may be challenging the literature contains two main lines of research for overcoming this problem one research stream has concentrated on designing institutional structures to permit financing early stage ventures this contractual and monitoring based approach is aimed at solving potential agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs e g admati and pfleiderer 1994 lerner 1995 hellmann 1998 and kaplan and str omberg 2001 2002 2003 a second research stream has suggested that when the quality of a start up cannot be directly observed external actors rely on the quality of the start up s affiliates as a signal of the start up s own quality

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

a status based model of market competition this article explores the significance of status processes for generating and reproducing hierarchy among producers in a market it develops a conception of a market as a status order in which each

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

top managerial prestige power and tender offer response a study of elite social networks and target firm cooperation during takeovers in this paper we explore the following research question when faced with a tender offer why do some firms resist and others cooperate in the past researchers have suggested that the manner in which firms respond to takeover attempts may be in part a function of managers personal motivations we contribute to this line of research by questioning whether other factors might be involved specifically we examine whether cooperation may be a function of the friendliness of the bidding company and the social networks shared by executives in the two firms i e bidder and target we examine how the power and connections of managers affect their responses to tender offers our results suggest that these factors do indeed play a role we found for example that target managers are more likely to cooperate under two conditions 1 if they have less prestigious connections than managers in the bidding firm and 2 if the target and bidding firms share numerous ties to the same prestigious networks in

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

getting off to a good start the effects of upper echelon affiliations on underwriter prestige the initial public offering ipo is one of the most critical events in the lifetime of a young firm prior research has shown that firms tend to have successful ipos if they go public with the endorsement of a prestigious lead underwriter this paper examines the antecedents to receiving endorsement by a prestigious underwriter and links this to the experience base of a firm s upper echelon we theorize that the amount and type of upper echelon experience serve as important symbols of a young firm s legitimacy to critical outsiders we introduce a typology of upper echelon experience that distinguishes between upper echelon upstream horizontal and downstream employment based affiliations and suggest that these different types of upper echelon affiliations allay different types of endorser concerns regarding firm legitimacy affecting the endorsement process further we theorize that the relationships between upper echelon experience and investment bank prestige will be moderated by technological uncertainty we test our assertions on a comprehensive sample of public and private biotechnology firms that were founded between 1961 and 1994 and that went public between 1979 and 1996 analyses of the five year career histories of the over 3 200 executives and directors that make up the upper echelons of these firms show that firms with upper echelons with affiliations with prominent downstream organizations i e pharmaceutical and or healthcare companies and with prominent horizontal organizations i e biotechnology companies are more likely to attract the endorsement of a prestigious investment bank we also find that the greater the range of upper echelon affiliations across the categories of upstream horizontal and downstream affiliations the more prestigious the firm s lead underwriter we also find that these latter results are moderated by technological uncertainty the present research has implications for the study of organizational legitimacy interorganizational endorsements and entrepreneurship

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

dependability and organizational bankruptcy an application of agency and prospect theory this paper proposes and tests a new model of organizational bankruptcy based on agency and prospect theory the paper argues that debtors with unprestigious top managers low liquidity and high leverage signal that they will be undependable exchange partners the model proposes that survival is contingent on maintaining an acceptable minimum level of these financial and managerial assets if a firm falls below that threshold level it has a higher probability of bankruptcy because creditors withdraw their financial support from the debtor consistent with agency theory this implies that bankruptcy can be viewed as the legal resolution of severe shareholder creditor conflicts about the levels of financial and managerial assets that the debtor should maintain this new model proposes that maintaining a minimum level of these assets is a necessary but not sufficient condition for bankruptcy some undependable firms delay bankruptcy by using strategies that create the hope that they will become dependable in the future according to prospect theory these strategies work because creditors wish to avoid recognizing significant losses and thus take on more risk than they might otherwise assume

wage differentials between the public and private sectors abstract public sector employment and the tax pressure has grown very rapidly in denmark in recent years this paper discusses a new policy option for government using its role as a dominant employer to reduce relative public sector wages the paper contains an empirical analysis of wage differences between the public and the private sectors in denmark using a longitudinal data set covering the years 1976 1985 fixed effect regressions show that a wage twist policy of this type has been used in these years one of the consequences of a wage twist policy in the public sector is recruitment and retention problems for public employees

top managerial prestige and organizational bankruptcy this paper extends earlier work on an alternative view of bankruptcy suggesting that bankruptcy occurs when creditors withdraw then support from a firm s top management team it further proposes that support for the top team depends upon the team s prestige five characteristics measuring the relative status of top teams were tested for their association with bankruptcy three of the characteristics focused on items commonly associated with membership in economic elites elite educational backgrounds board memberships and previous employment as officers in other corporations the fourth and fifth characteristics focused on membership in political and military elites the results indicated that political and board connections were negatively associated with bankruptcy in the year of failure even when financial factors and cooptive board linkages were controlled the results also showed that failing firms attempted to improve their managerial prestige three to four years before they failed they were how

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

welfare regimes family supportive policies and women s employment along the life course this article examines women s employment patterns during thechild rearing period and the consequences of those patterns for earnings later in life in 12 industralized countries this study proposes an analytic framework that combines welfare regime and gender specific policies to explain country differences the findings presented here suggest that institutional arrangements mediate the costs to women s part time and intermittent employment within welfare regimes employment continuity is highest among countries in which the state provides support for working mothers furthermore this study finds that lower support for mothers employment is associated with higher wage penalties to employment discontinuity

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

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

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

nonresponse and delayed response to competitive moves the roles of competitor dependence and action irreversibility competitive moves that are unchallenged or to which response is delayed are important weapons in a strategist s arsenal so variables that discourage or delay response are of great interest using

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

how much prestige is enough assessing the value of multiple types of high status affiliates for young firms abstract young unproven firms can signal their worthiness or potential through affiliations with various types of prestigious parties drawing from signaling theory we present a formal consideration of the implications of multiple numbers and types of prestigious affiliates for ipo valuations we argue that different types of prestigious affiliates prestigious executives directors venture capital firms and underwriters convey different signals of ipo worth depending on the extent to which they provide certification or substantive benefits based on a sample of 257 software ipos we find considerable support for our expectations the benefits of prestigious executives and directors accumulate in a linear more is better fashion in contrast the payoffs from vc and underwriter prestige accumulate in a curvilinear fashion we discuss the theoretical implications of these findings and propose an agenda for future research

the political economy of targeting one of the most widely used method of targeting is to reduce welfare benefits as income rises although the need for such targeting is clear enough it also entails two important difficulties firstly the prospect for the recipients of losing part of their benefits if they were to earn more can be a deterrent to work harder secondly by reducing the number of recipients targeting reduces the political support for taxation and redistribution the purpose of this paper is to study the voting equilibrium of the degree of targeting and the level of taxation in an economy where labour supply is variable the analysis reveals that targeting may be fatal for redistribution even though it rejects strictly less than the richest half of the population and that it is not possible for a coalition of the extremes to form and reject the middle income group from the welfare system moreover because targeting affects labour supply we find that pareto improvements are possible when targeting is either too low or too high we also find that voting simultaneously over taxation and targeting is favourable to the poor in the sense that they can converge to their most preferred policy by successively forming a majority coalition with the rich to increase targeting and with the middle to increase taxation

media legitimation effects in the market for initial public offerings in this study we argue that media provided information affects investors impressions of newly public firms in 225 initial public offerings ipos the volume of mediaprovided information had a negative diminishing relationship with underpricing and a positive diminishing relationship with stock turnover on the first day of trading the relationship between the tenor of media provided information and underpricing increases at a nonlinear rate and decreases similarly for turnover findings provide important evidence that publicly available information not only reflects ipos legitimacy but also adds to their legitimacy and influences investor behavior in the last 20 years an increasing amount of research on markets has been conducted from a social constructionist perspective emphasizing how social structures enhance the flow of useful and credible information that market participants use to reduce the uncertainty of market exchanges e g aldrich fiol 1994 zuckerman 1999 further recent organizational research has begun to stress the influence of information intermediaries such as financial analysts and the media on mar

organizational debut on the public stage marketing myopia and initial public offerings successful initial public offerings ipos provide firms with access to valuable resources but also put pressure on firms to impress potential investors with evidence of their current well being and prospects for future growth to impress investors ipo firms might curtail their marketing budgets which appears to inflate current earnings and provide evidence of current well being however curtailing marketing budgets unexpectedly during an ipo may be a myopic practice in that the immediate benefits of these budget cuts are offset by their longer term adverse consequences on financial well being the extent of these adverse consequences in turn may be moderated by external firm factors including strategic alliances and key customer relationships and internal firm factors such as the strategic emphasis on value creation versus value appropriation a sample of 1 095 ipos during 2000 2011 reveals evidence of myopic marketing practices in more than 37 of the sample investors seem misled during ipos bu

government employment and the provision of fringe benefits this study uses individual level data from the united states to examine the influence of government employment on the provision of five major fringe benefits four of the five benefits are more likely to be provided to government workers than to their private sector counterparts unlike wage comparisons which typically find substantial overpayment only for federal workers the findings suggest that past wage differentials underestimate the true compensation advantage enjoyed by government workers

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

inequality in the world polity the structure of international organization recent research reveals strong effects of involvement in international organizations on state policies but much of this research downplays inequality in world political participation and there is only a limited understanding of what explains world polity ties using data on memberships in intergovernmental and international non governmental organizations igos and ingos for 1960 through 2000 this study analyzes inequality in the world polity igo ties are fairly evenly distributed but the level of inequality in ingo ties is as high as the level of world income inequality since 1960 inequality in ties to igos decreased sharply but inequality in ties to ingos remained more stable a conflict centered model of the world polity is developed here that explains world political participation as a function of material and symbolic conflict rich core western states and societies have significantly more ties to the world polity than do others powerful states dominate igos less now than they did in 1960 but rich core western societies have grown more dominant in the ingo field

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

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

benefits and the labour supply of women married to unemployed men this paper seeks to explain the low labor force participation rates of women married to unemployed men in the reducing the net increment to household income that would result from the wife s employment simple probit models of the participation and part time full time decisions are estimated using a large cross sectional data set the results confirm the importance of severe disincentive effects controlling for labor market conditions income related benefits are found to create worse problems than national insurance benefits both types impede part time work in particular copyright 1990 by royal economic society

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

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

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

social security policy in a changing labour market conditions in the uk labour market of the 1990s are markedly different from those which prevailed in the post war period when the modern welfare state was created the main differences include a growth in long term unemployment in female part time employment and in low paid employment and self employment in some respects social security policy has adapted to reflect these new patterns the clearest example of this is the introduction and enhancement of in work benefits such as family credit however two of the main strands of benefit policy in recent decades greater reliance on family based means testing and an increased role for private insurance do not fit so well with labour market trends in the case of the privatization of mortgage insurance the result is likely to be further redistribution away from those in insecure or low paid employment copyright 1995 by oxford university press

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

a reexamination of the federal private wage differential in the united states the federal private wage differential is reexamined with recent data using specifications similar to those used in three previous studies i find that the federal private wage differential has narrowed since the 1974 79 period analyzed in those studies in addition i discover that wage differentials based on specifications used in the literature are biased upward because the previous studies did not control for detailed occupational and locational characteristics of workers corrected point estimates of the wage gap are much smaller than previous estimates in the literature differences in the gap across demographic groups occupations and locations are also discussed

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

gender the welfare state and public employment a comparative study of seven industrialized countries using data from the luxembourg income study lis the authors explore the influence of government employment on the gender gap in earnings in seven countries they address four questions on the effects of public sector employment on the gender gap in earnings 1 do governments offer jobs that are comparatively high paying 2 does public employment benefit some workers such as low paid workers more than others 3 are public sector employment advantages explained by differences in worker characteristics and the occupational mix 4 what is the effect of public employment its extent and its pay structure on gender gaps in wages the results indicate marked variation across liberal conservative and social democratic welfare states but reveal a number of uniformities as well in most of the seven countries in the sample public sector workers earn more on average than do workers in the private sector and most earnings advantages are concentrated on the low end of the earnings distribution the effect of public employment on the overall gender gap in wages is limited in most countries the authors discuss the implications of these results for theory and research on gender and the welfare state

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

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

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 evolution of intraindustry firm heterogeneity insights from a process study in this study we propose a process framework for understanding the evolution of intraindustry firm heterogeneity drawing on a longitudinal study of the development of the cellular telephone servi

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

the credibility of social climbing when does inter firm mobility not influence organizational status this paper examines when inter firm mobility influences organizational status whereas a low status firm can accumulate prestigious affiliations by hiring from a high status firm the status distance between these firms may influence whether the mobility event is perceived as credible if the mobility event lacks credibility meaning that market participants believe that the employee moved for a reason other than the new employer s quality then the hiring firm is less likely to improve its status position we also explore this effect s symmetry and find that a high status firm is less likely to experience status decline when the mobility event lacks credibility we assess these hypotheses in the context of the inter firm mobility of partners of the subsidiary offices of international law firms in hong kong from 1998 to 2008

a short history of labour turnover job tenure and job security 1975 93 how extensive is labour turnover and how does it vary by gender skill and over time using survey data from britain between 1975 and 1993 this study documents these features and discovers evidence of widening inequalities in job stability and security for the majority still in full time employment average job durations are little changed from those of twenty years ago for those seeking employment however current patterns of job creation mean that entry jobs are now of shorter duration more unstable and relatively less well paid nor do entry jobs offer sufficient access into stable jobs as a result entry jobs are increasingly taken by those with a partner in work polarising the distribution of employment and thereby disenfranchising around one fifth of working age households from regular access to earned incomes copyright 1995 by oxford university press

effects of social capital and power on surviving transformational change the case of initial public offerings we examined how social capital and the power of venture capitalists and founderceos affect ipo firm survival using data from 218 u s initial public offerings conducted in 1992 we found that average management team tenure and an ipo deal s network embeddedness decreased the likelihood of failure during a firm s first five years as a public entity founder ceo presence at the time of an ipo interacted with ceo ownership to decrease the likelihood of failure and ceo ownership and venture capitalist ownership concentration also decreased that likelihood evolutionary perspectives on organizations are often accompanied by the presumption that organizations face an increased risk of failure early in their lives owing to liabilities of newness aldrich 1999 stinchcombe 1965 as organizational goals and patterns of activity become routinized over time increased reliability in performance and accountability for actions taken enhance a firm s survival chances hannan freeman 1984 this process however also generates strong inertial pressures that not only discourage organizational change but also because of the potential for disruption to existing internal and external routines make change hazardous research findings suggest that even in older better established firms significant transformational events during their life cycles can effectively reset the clock and reintroduce risks associated with the liability of newness as firms struggle to adapt strategies internal operational and administrative processes and or external ties and relationships amburgey kelly barnett 1993 thus transformational change in organizational operations decreases efficiency and increases failure rates at least in the short term as resources and attention are diverted from normal routinized operating functions to processes involving adaptation and reorientation haveman 1992

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

which ties matter when the contingent effects of interorganizational partnerships on ipo success this paper investigates the contingent value of interorganizational relationships at the time of a young firm s initial public offering ipo we compare the signaling value to young firms of having ties with two types of interorganizational partnerships endorsement relationships such as those with venture capital firms and investment banks and strategic alliance partnerships we propose that under different equity market conditions potential investors in an issuing firm attend to different types of uncertainty attention to these different types of uncertainty affects investors perceptions of the relative value of a young firm s different kinds of endorsements and partnerships and hence ipo success results from a sample of young biotechnology firms show that ties to prominent venture capital firms are particularly beneficial to ipo success during cold markets while ties to prominent investment banks are particularly beneficial to ipo success during hot markets a firm s strategic alliances with major pharmaceutical health care firms did not have such contingent effects implications for understanding the contingent value of interorganizational ties are discussed copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

the labour market and economic risk friend or foe this paper examines the twofold role of the labour market in household economic risk management as a source of household consumption risk and as an instrument for insuring consumption against contingencies it outlines a framework for analysing this twofold role of the labour market and uses data from the british household panel survey 1991 1996 to explore this empirically it identifies the relative importance of the labour market and other factors in producing changes in the financial situation of individuals it also implements full insurance tests of whether unemployment and other external shocks to the household are correlated with consumption growth it concludes that labour market factors are a dominant source of change in individuals financial situation with a predominantly positive effect on the financial situation of the better off and a predominantly negative impact on the financial situation of the less well off it also finds that households are unable to fully insure their consumpti

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

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

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 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

toward a construct of liability of origin in this paper we advance a novel concept of liability of origin to explicate the mechanisms through which location can be become either a liability or an advantage our analysis sheds light on how firms ability to compete and gain legitimacy can be derailed or enhanced by their geographical location we illustrate our theoretical analysis using multiple cases in the airline industry in africa four distinct phases that explicate how liability of origin manifests in firms legitimacy quest are indicated our work highlights how actions and inactions of rival firms can make the geographical origin of a firm geographicalness to shift from being a strategic asset to become a liability we outline a number of implications for practice and fruitful avenues for future research

good times bad times postwar labor s share of national income in capitalist democracies this article returns to a classic question of political economy the zero sum conflict between capital and labor over the division of the national income pie a detailed description of labor s shar