Labor unions, chiefly through collective organizing and bargaining, almost universally increase the wages of their members, even after controlling for individual, job, firm, and other characteristics that affect pay (Fang and Verma 2002). This earnings advantage of union workers is known as the...

This paper consists of three economic literature review essays that survey the Palestinian labor market during the last three decades. The first essay examines the economic return to schooling since 1981 until the recent period, taking into consideration the major shocks that the Palestinian...

Despite a policy consensus that closing gender employment gaps will boost economic growth, relatively little is known about the size of these gains in many developing countries. This paper develops a new Gender Employment Gap Index (GEGI), which is equal to the size of long-run GDP per capita...

This study uncovers a gender labor productivity gap among informal firms in 14 developing economies. The results show that labor productivity is approximately 15.2 percent (or 0.165 log point) lower among women-owned than men-owned informal firms. Decomposition techniques reveal several factors...

We examine work patterns in the U.S. from 1973-2018, with the novel focus on days per week, using intermittent CPS samples and one ATUS sample. Among full-time workers the incidence of four-day work tripled, with 8 million additional four-day workers. Similar growth occurred in the Netherlands,...

Much attention is focused on finding ways to encourage females to study STEM in school and college but what actually happens once women complete a STEM degree? We use the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey to trace out gender differences in STEM persistence over the career. We find a continuous...

This paper analyzes whether technological change improves equality of labor market opportunities by decreasing returns to parental background. We find that in Germany during the 1990s, computerization improved the access to technologyadopting occupations for workers with low-educated parents,...

This paper studies the wage differentials between the public and private sectors in Spain, as well as its distribution across different educational levels and by gender. To do so, the well-known Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition of mincerian wage regressions is applied for both sectors, breaking down...

In many OECD countries, women are underrepresented in the highest status, highest paying positions and overrepresented in the lowest status, lowest paying positions. One potential reason for this inequity is the “motherhood penalty,” where women with children face more roadblocks in hiring...

The public sector plays a large role in many developing economies, but its effect on earnings inequality dynamics has not been widely studied. In this paper, we investigate the earnings inequality trends and their determinants in the decades before and after the Tunisian Revolution, focusing on...

This paper is among the firsts to investigate the impact of overeducation and overskilling on workers' wages using a unique pan-European database covering twenty-eight countries for the year 2014, namely the CEDEFOP's European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey. Overall, the results suggest a wage...

This paper is among the firsts to investigate the impact of overeducation and overskilling on workers' wages using a unique pan-European database covering twenty-eight countries for the year 2014, namely the CEDEFOP's European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey. Overall, the results suggest a wage...

To obtain a more complete understanding of the persisting gender earnings gap in Germany, this paper investigates both the cross-sectional and biographical dimension of gender inequalities. Using an Oaxaca Blinder decomposition, we show that the gender gap in annual earnings is largely driven by...

We study how licensing, certification and unionisation affect the wages of natives and migrants and their representation among licensed, certified, and unionized workers. We provide evidence of a dual role of labor market institutions, which both screen workers based on unobservable...

This study presents new evidence on immigrant-native wage differentials estimated in consideration of regional differences regarding the presence of Non-German population in metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas between 2000 and 2019 in Germany. Using linked employer-employee-data,...

This empirical paper analyzes labor market sorting across establishments using Swedish register data on cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. We draw on the theoretical foundations of Chone' and Kramarz (2021), in which workers are endowed with sets of multidimensional skills that need to be...

Implicit gender bias may affect hiring and promotion decisions, implying inefficiencies in the outcome of selection processes. We focus on the dynamics of gender bias when selecting candidates for a committee or position, and obtain the long-run female share as well as the conditions for a glass...

We propose a competitive general equilibrium theory of gender discrimination in labor market where male and female workers are equally productive, but the female workers are deliberately paid less than the male due to subjective discrimination. Pioneering works of Becker (1957) and Arrow (1973),...

This paper assesses gender differences in the effects of adverse conditions at labor-market entry in a developing region. Using harmonized microdata from national household surveys for 15 Latin American countries, we build a synthetic panel of cohorts that potentially transition from school to...

Previous work shows that higher male wage inequality decreases the share of ever married women in their 20s, consistent with the theoretical prediction that greater male wage dispersion increases the return to marital search. Consequently, male wage inequality should be associated with higher...

Purpose - On the one hand, everyone agrees that economics should be fair, that workers should get equal pay for equal work. Any instance of unfairness causes a strong disagreement. On the other hand, in many companies, advanced workers – who produce more than others - get paid...

The study explores how wages grow with experience in the Russian Federation. In all available cross-sectional data, the trajectory of the observed wage-experience profile is flat, peaks early, and declines sharply afterwards. This shape looks puzzling since it differs starkly from that observed...

We evaluate a temporary public sector employment program targeted at individuals with weak labor market attachment, applying dynamic inverse probability weighting to account for dynamic selection. We show that the program is successful in increasing employment and reducing social assistance....

We compare real wage differences between centralized and peripheral areas and highly centralized and peripheral areas using vast information of German administrative data that contains more than 2.8 Million individuals and 660,000 firms. We provide substantial empirical evidence that most of the...

This paper examines the behavior of dual jobholders to test a simple model of wage bargaining and wage posting. We estimate the sensitivity of wages and separation rates to wage shocks in a worker's secondary job to assess the degree of bargaining versus wage posting in the labor market. We...

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers’ beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

I develop an assignment model of occupations with multidimensional heterogeneity in production tasks and worker skills. Tasks are distributed continuously in the skill space, whereas workers have a discrete distribution with a finite number of types. Occupations arise endogenously as bundles of...

IVF allows women to delay birth and pursue careers, but IVF massively increases the risk of twin birth. There is limited evidence of how having twins influences women's post-birth careers. We investigate this, leveraging a single embryo transfer (SET) mandate implemented in Sweden in 2003,...

Although constraints on hours worked at the firm-level are viewed as an important determinant of firm wages, little direct evidence exists to support this view. In this paper, we use linked employer-employee data on hours worked in Denmark to measure hours constraints and to investigate how...

This paper uses a college-by-graduate degree fixed effects estimator to evaluate the returns to 19 different graduate degrees for men and women. We find substantial variation across degrees, and evidence that OLS over-estimates the returns to degrees with the highest average earnings and...

We study the nature of firm pay dynamics. To this end, we propose a statistical model that extends the seminal framework by Abowd, Kramarz and Margolis (1999) to allow for idiosyncratically time-varying firm pay policies. We estimate the model using linked employer-employee data for Sweden from...