This paper studies the relationship between changes in occupational employment, occupational wages, and rising overall wage inequality. Using long-running administrative panel data with detailed occupation codes, we first document that in all occupations, entrants and leavers earn lower wages...

This paper investigates how high school gender composition affects students' participation in STEM at college. Using Danish administrative data, we exploit idiosyncratic within-school variation in gender composition. We find that having a larger proportion of female peers reduces women's...

Labor market opportunities and wages may be unfair for various reasons, and how workers respond to different types of unfairness can have major economic consequences. Using an online labor platform, where workers engage in an individual task for a piece-rate wage, we investigate the causal...

The skill premium has increased significantly in the United States in the last five decades. During the same period, individual wage risk has also increased. This paper proposes a mechanism through which a rise in wage risk increases the skill premium. Intuitively, a rise in uninsured wage risk...

The vast majority of existing studies that estimate the average unexplained gender pay gap use unnecessarily restrictive linear versions of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. Using a notably rich and large data set of 1.7 million employees in Switzerland, we investigate how the methodological...

In Austria, a gender pay transparency law was introduced in 2011, requiring companies with more than 1,000 employees to publish a pay report every other year. Firms with 500, 250, and 150 employees were subject to this requirement at later years. We estimate the impact of the law on men’s...

The canonical supply-demand model of the wage returns to skill has been extremely influential; however, it has faced several important challenges. Several studies show that the standard approach sometimes produces theoretically wrong-signed elasticities of substitution, yields counterintuitive...

This paper investigates the impact of voter support on the representation of women in the political profession. The empirical analysis exploits two-stage elections in the United States and Italy to hold the selection of candidates constant. In two-stage elections, candidates are admitted to the...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens? approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that ?women and men shall...

This paper estimates the effects on earnings of "gap years" between high school and university enrollment. The effect is estimated by means of standard earnings functions augmented to account for gap years and a rich set of control variables using administrative Swedish data. We find that...