Male–female wage differentials in Japan

This paper empirically analyzes the gender wage gap in Japan using a new data set KHPS2004 which contains a wealth of information on the work history of individuals. KHPS2004 enables us to estimate wage functions without overstating individual’s human capital accumulation by work experience especially for females. Neuman-Oaxaca decomposition method is employed to analyze why the gender wage gap appears to exist in Japan. Main reasons as follows. First, full-time work experience and seniority which affect significantly wages is shorter for females than for males. Second, there are significant differences in evaluation of full-time experience between males and females.     

Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in Japan

This paper analyzes whether or not Japanese nominal wages exhibit downward rigidity. We posit a wage adjustment model in which, below a certain wage inflation rate, wages may or may not move as much as optimal or notional wages do. By using data on wages of 18 industries and aggregate time series data, we find that nominal wages were rigid downward until 1998, but not with the inclusion of years 1999 and 2000. That is, Japanese wages responded flexibly downward to the recession of 1997–1998, but with a lag. The interpretation of such results is not straightforward. But we provide some preliminary discussions of possible factors behind such a pattern of wage movements, focusing on the relationship between wage changes and the seniority-based wage system. J. Japan. Int. Econ., March 2001, 15(1), pp. 50–67. The Bank of Japan, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 103-0021, Japan. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E24, E31, J30.     

Equal Employment Opportunity Law and the gender wage gap in Japan: A cohort analysis

In this article, I perform a cohort-based analysis of the female-to-male wage gap using aggregate data in Japan from 1975 to 2005. While the inter-cohort closing in the gender wage gap is apparent, the convergence is smaller when the gap is calculated for each level of education. This pattern suggests that a certain portion of the gender wage convergence is due to changes in the educational composition of the workforce. I find that educational composition changes played a larger role in closing the pay gap for younger cohorts than it did for older cohorts. Highly educated women who entered the labor market after the enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law gained in that they had more regular full-time employment but did not experience wage gains relative to their male counterparts.     

我国碳减排的定量评估

作为全球第一大碳排放国和第二大经济体,我国正承受着越来越大的碳减排压力。在世界各国都参与应对气候变化的进程中,我国的最优碳减排幅度是怎样的呢？本文在Nordhaus的RICE-2010模型基础上,通过将化石能源的消耗内生于经济系统模块,改良出RICE-E模型。数值计算表明,从2005至2095年,我国需实现完全碳减排,相应的碳税水平从每吨碳排放68．7元（2010年价）提高到接近2000元。这个力度在世界各大国中并不是最激进的,位处俄罗斯和美国之后,与欧盟、拉美为同一档次,但强于日本和印度。在此碳减排进程下,我国碳排放量由升转降的时间拐点出现在2055年左右。     

French Retirement Reforms and Intragenerational Equity in Retirement Duration

As most developed countries, France has gone over the last 20 years through a process of pension system reforms, mainly aiming at increasing the average retirement age, through increasing the required number of contribution years or through postponing legal (minimal and/or normal) ages. Public debates over which lever should be preferred have been paramount in France, with concerns focusing on redistribution issues between high wage high life-expectancy and low-wage low life-expectancy workers. In this paper, we empirically address this issue by simulating the differentiated impacts of the past French reforms on average retirement ages across wage quartiles. Our simulations show that increasing the required duration criterion—as was done by the 1993 and 2003 reforms–have redistributive impact as regards retirement age, while increasing the normal age—as was done by the 2010 reform—has a counter-distributive impact. The redistributive impact on average of the required duration criterion however only holds thanks to the fact that disabled workers—most of them in the lowest wage quartile—are exempted from it. Last, increasing minimal age has ambiguous impacts according to gender: redistributive among women but counter-distributive among men.     

Gender Wage Inequality and Economic Growth: Is There Really a Puzzle?-A Comment

Seguino (2000) shows that gender wage discrimination in export-oriented semi-industrialized countries might be fostering investment and growth in general. While the original analysis does not have internationally comparable wage discrimination data, we replicate the analysis using data from a meta-study on gender wage discrimination and do not find any evidence that more discrimination might further economic growth-on the contrary: if anything the impact of gender inequality is negative for growth. Standing up for more gender equality-also in terms of wages-is good for equity considerations and at least not negative for growth.     

Millennials and the Gender Wage Gap in the U.S.: A Cross-Cohort Comparison of Young Workers Born in the 1960s and the 1980s

Using two cohorts of young workers born in the early 1960s and early 1980s, this paper analyzes the temporal change in the U.S. gender wage gap and its determinants, which persists for both explained and unexplained reasons. Results suggest that the gender wage gap closed four (seven) percentage points at the mean (median) between cohorts. It finds cross-cohort evidence that young females’ increasing returns to marriage and a changing occupational wage structure contributed to a narrowing of the gap. Nonetheless, the majority of this convergence remains unexplained due to relative improvements in unobservable institutional factors or heterogeneity for females. Compared to the previous generation, millennials likely entered a more progressive, female-friendly labor market. It is also possible that female millennials are more ambitious and competitive in their early years of work experience relative to females born in the 1960s.     

Full-Time and Part-Time Work and the Gender Wage Gap

Using hourly and weekly wages from the Canadian Labour Force Survey from 2000 until 2018, workers were separated into full-time and part-time and the following striking observation was documented. The overall gender wage gap is larger than either the full-time pay gap or the part-time pay gap, even after controlling for detailed personal and job characteristics. This result is a consequence of two findings: (i) part-time wages are lower than full-time wages, and (ii) the majority of part-time workers are women. In aggregation, this brings down the average female wage, leading to a larger aggregate gender wage gap. This was further linked to a differential selection by gender into full-time and part-time work, with women of higher earnings potential being overrepresented in the pool of part-time workers, resulting in no gender pay gap in the part-time worker category. Policies targeted at encouraging full-time employment for women should therefore reduce the gender wage gap.

     

Projecting the U.S. gender wage gap 2000–40

This paper projects the gender wage gap for 25–64 year old Americans for the period 2000–40. The analysis uses data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) for 1995 and 1996 together with the U.S. Census Bureau demographic projections. The method combines the population projections with assumptions regarding the evolution of educational attainment in order to first project the future distribution of skills and, based on these projections, the future size of the gender wage gap. The main set of projections suggests that changing skill characteristics—specifically educational attainment—will continue to close the gender wage gap. However, even in 2040, a substantial pay gap of at least 75 percent of the size of that in 1995 will remain.     

A comparison of the wage structure between the public and private sectors in Japan

This study compares the wages in the public and private sectors in Japan. In addition to comparing overall wage levels, we examine the differences in the wage structures, specifically, the relative wages by gender, age, education, and region. The size of the public sector wage premium depends crucially on the size of the private companies chosen as the comparison group. Wage gaps by gender and educational attainment are smaller in the public sector than they are in private companies. The public sector's age–wage profile is steeper than that of the private sector. Public sector wages are more compressed. In other words, the wages are relatively higher at the lower end of the wage distribution and relatively lower at the higher end. The regional wage differentials are smaller in the public sector. Here, the wage levels of public sector workers are relatively higher in rural regions and relatively lower in large metropolitan regions. To ensure the efficient provision of public services, it is inappropriate to compare only mean wages.     

Retirement policy,employment status,and gender pay gap in urban China

China’s current retirement policy has been in effect since 1978. The legal retirement age is 50 years for female workers, 55 years for female cadres, and 60 years for male cadres and workers; women can retire 5 or 10 years earlier than men. This difference in legal retirement age may affect wage growth in those approaching retirement. Based on China’s Urban Household Survey data set, this study investigated the influence of retirement age differences on the gender pay gap. From age 30 to 49 years, the wage difference between female workers and cadres increased by approximately 15 % more than that of men. After consideration of possible endogeneity problems and demonstration of the robustness of the regression results, the study determined that such differences were likely caused by gender and identity differences at retirement age. Among workers and cadres, the retirement age policy exacerbated gender differences in wages through working hours, wage rate, career promotion, and job change activity in those approaching retirement.     

Parenthood and the gender wage gap in urban China

Using data from the Chinese Household Income Project survey and decomposition methods, this study explored the influence of parenthood on the gender wage gap in urban China in 2002 and 2018. Our findings showed that the employment rate is lower for women than men in both childless and with child groups, and the gender gap expanded from 2002 to 2018. The data revealed a parenthood wage penalty in 2002 and a parenthood wage premium in 2018. Moreover, the parenthood wage penalty was greater for women than for men and contributed to the formation of the gender wage gap. We also found that three components: motherhood wage penalty, fatherhood wage premium, and gender wage gap in the childless group contributed to the formation of the gender wage gap. From 2002–2018, the motherhood wage penalty decreased, whereas the fatherhood wage premium increased.     

健康人力资本与性别工资差异

现有对性别工资差异的研究大多是基于教育、经验等人力资本对工资的影响进行分析而忽视了健康人力资本的作用。本文运用中国健康与营养调查数据,将健康人力资本引入工资决定模型,对我国劳动力市场上健康人力资本对工资的影响以及性别工资差异进行了实证分析。研究发现：健康人力资本是影响我国居民工资收入的重要因素;我国劳动力市场上存在明显的性别工资差异,女性工资显著低于男性;利用Oaxaca—Cotton的分解方法发现性别工资差异中大约只有20％可以被个体特征合理解释,余下的部分被认为是对女性的歧视和没能观测到的因素所致。健康人力资本对工资的边际贡献在性别之间的差异是性别工资差异的重要来源。     

Temporal Causality and the Dynamics of Crime and Delinquency

This paper is the first attempt to identify crime-delinquency relationship at the national level. We apply various techniques to identify the dynamic relationship between crime and delinquency rates in USA from 1987 to 2008. Two types of crime rates are observed, violent and property crime rate. The study finds strong short-term evidence that delinquency causes an increase in property crime rate for the years 1987 through 1995 and again 1996 through 2000, but no evidence for a long-term relationship in the full sample 1987 through 2008. The reverse effect of crime on delinquency rate is mostly insignificant. The property values work as a linkage between crime-delinquency relationship in the short-term data. One important finding of this study is the apparent exogeneity of the crime rate with respect to delinquency rate during the economic downturn. We also control for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, housing starts, and median weekly wage.     

Changing labor-force gender composition and male-female income diversity in Singapore

This paper traces the employment trends by gender in various industries, occupational groups, and educational levels in the city-state of Singapore. Over the years, Singapore’s female labor-force participation rate has increased as a result of rising educational attainment. At the same time, income inequality among the females has increased, while male-female income inequality has decreased. This paper explores the gender wage gap at various occupational and educational levels. It is found that the gender wage gap has been reduced over the period 1975–1999. This paper also finds that because of a lack of sufficient childcare facilities and unavailability of part-time work, women who leave the labor market to start families face certain obstacles when trying to re-enter the workforce.     

The Wage Rate and the Worker's Productivity: the Case of the Japanese Chemical Industry

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the wage rate and the productivity of the blue-collar worker in Japan. In this paper, micro data from a factory of chemical industry in Japan is used for our empirical study. Our empirical results indicate that, if the index of the labor productivity is an appropriate index of the labor productivity, the labor productivity plays a crucial role in the determination of the wage rate in a particular Japanese chemical factory of the 1960s.     

城市外来劳动力的性别收入差距与工资歧视———基于非条件分位数回归的分解方法

内容文章利用非条件分位数回归的分解方法对2011年城市外来劳动力群体的性别工资差距进行了分析.研究发现:(1)城市外来劳动力群体中,性别间受教育程度的差异已经变得不太显著,但在职业方面针对女性外来劳动力的“粘性地板”现象仍然十分突出.(2)人力资本禀赋和就业职业特征对男性与女性外来劳动力工资的影响程度有所不同,不同收入分位数上的影响系数也有明显的差异.(3)性别歧视是造成外来劳动力性别间收入差距的主要原因,而男性与女性劳动者工作经验的差距以及工作经验收益率的差异已经取代教育因素成为了性别收入差距中的突出问题     

Occupational Segregation and its Effect on Estimates of the Gender Wage Differential: Evidence from Brunei

This paper investigates the impact of the different occupational distributions of the gender groups on the gender wage differential in Brunei. We disaggregate occupational differences into explained and unexplained portions as this can provide better estimates of across-occupation and within-occupation wage differentials. Using data from the Brunei 1995 Labor Force Survey report, results indicated that the gender wage difference is approximately 60%. Unlike other studies, it is found that in Brunei the unexplained portion of occupational segregation has had an impact on gender wage differentials and accounts for approximately one-third of the observed gap. Interestingly, the unexplained component of the within-occupation gap is relatively less than in some developed economies. This is attributed to the effects of the large public sector in Brunei and its regulated pay scales.     

Regional patterns of employment changes of less-educated men in Japan: 1990–2007

We investigate regional patterns in employment of less-educated men in Japan from 1990 to 2007. The employment–population ratio of junior high school graduate men (9 years of compulsory schooling) decreased from 1990 to 2007. Wage growth across regions had a unique pattern during this period: it was high in the low-wage regions in the 1990s but high in the high-wage regions in the 2000s. We use these regional variations in wage growth to identify the labor supply elasticity of less-educated men. The estimated elasticity of the employment-to-population ratio of junior high school graduate men is around 0.15.