The motherhood wage gap: What about job amenities?

Women with children tend to earn lower hourly wages than women without children — a shortfall known as the ‘motherhood wage gap’. While many studies provide evidence for this empirical fact and explore several hypotheses about its causes, the impact of motherhood on job dimensions other than wages has scarcely been investigated. In order to assess changes in women's jobs around motherhood, I use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and employ a first difference analysis. The results reveal that women when having children accommodate at their original employer primarily through adjustments in working hours. Yet, when changing the employer women adjust their jobs in several dimensions, such as different aspects of the work schedule (working hours, work at night or according to a flexible schedule) as well as the level of stress. Further analysis provides some limited support for the motherhood wage gap being explained by adjustments in the work conditions.     

Who Benefits from Marriage?*

The phenomenon that married men earn higher average wages than unmarried men – the marriage premium – is well known. However, the robustness of the premium across the wage distribution and the underlying causes of the marriage premium are unclear. Focusing on the entire wage distribution and employing recently developed semi‐non‐parametric tests for quantile treatment effects, our findings cast doubt on the robustness of the premium. We find that the premium is explained by selection above the median, whereas a positive premium is obtained only at very low wages. The causal effect at low wages may be attributable to employer discrimination.     

ATTITUDES TOWARDS ECONOMIC RISK AND THE GENDER PAY GAP

This paper examines the links between gender differences in attitudes towards economic risk and the gender pay gap. Consistent with the literature on the socio-economic determinants of attitudes towards economic risk, it shows that females are much more risk averse than males. It then extends this research to show that workers with more favorable attitudes towards risk are associated with higher earnings, and that gender differences in attitudes towards economic risk can account for a small, though important, part of the standardized gender pay gap.     

U.S. University Research Parks

University research parks are important as a mechanism for the transfer of academic research findings, as a source of knowledge spillovers, and as a catalyst for national and regional economic growth. We develop a model to describe the growth, or productivity, of research parks, and we test this model using the newly constructed National Science Foundation database on university research parks. We find that parks closer to the university, operated by a private organization, and with a specific technology focus—information technology in particular—grow faster than the average of 8.4% per year.     

How Does Education Affect the Earnings Distribution in Urban China?*

It is widely believed that investing in education could be an effective strategy to promote higher standards of living and equity. We empirically assess this claim by estimating returns to education across the whole earnings distribution in urban China and find supporting evidence. In particular, we find that returns to education are more pronounced for individuals in the lower tail of the distribution than for those in the upper tail and that returns to education are uniformly larger for women than men. We also find that returns to education increased over time across the whole earnings distribution.     

Seniority Profiles in Unionized Workplaces: Do Unions Still have the Edge?*

The focus of this study is to distinguish the different paths seniority earning profiles follow depending on whether the individual is employed in a workplace where trade unions and collective bargaining are present, or not. Within this framework, two propositions are set. In the union sector seniority should be an important determinant of wages, while in the non‐union sector productivity, proxied by occupational experience, should have a key role on earning profiles. The empirical analysis verifies both propositions. Seniority earning profiles appear to be steeper in the union sector, while occupational expertise is estimated to have a more significant role in non‐union jobs.     

Seniority wages and establishment characteristics

A representative linked employer-employee panel and an innovative two-step estimation strategy are used to show that large and profitable establishments as well as establishments with a highly qualified workforce pay high seniority wages. Also collective bargaining coverage, works councils and reduced working time for older employees are positively correlated with seniority wages, the share of foreigners, females as well as initial wage levels for job entrants are negatively correlated. These results support an agency based motivation for seniority wages with older employees' wages set higher than their productivity.     

Noncognitive skills, occupational attainment, and relative wages

This paper examines whether men's and women's noncognitive skills influence their occupational attainment and, if so, whether this contributes to the disparity in their relative wages. We find that noncognitive skills have a substantial effect on the probability of employment in many, though not all, occupations in ways that differ by gender. Consequently, men and women with similar noncognitive skills enter occupations at very different rates. Women, however, have lower wages on average not because they work in different occupations than men do, but rather because they earn less than their male colleagues employed in the same occupation. On balance, women's noncognitive skills give them a slight wage advantage. Finally, we find that accounting for the endogeneity of occupational attainment more than halves the proportion of the overall gender wage gap that is unexplained.     

Job security and employee well-being: Evidence from matched survey and register data

We examine the effects of establishment- and industry-level labor market turnover on employees' well-being. The linked employer-employee panel data contain both survey information on employees' subjective well-being and comprehensive register-based information on job and worker flows. We test for the existence of compensating wage differentials by explaining wages and job satisfaction with average uncertainties, measured by an indicator for a high excessive turnover (churning) rate. The results are consistent with the theory of compensating wage differentials, since high uncertainty increases real wages, but high uncertainty has no effect on job satisfaction while not controlling for wages.     

Wage inequality, technology and trade: 21st century evidence

This paper describes and explains some of the principal trends in the wage and skill distribution in recent decades. Increases in wage inequality started in the US and UK at the end of the 1970s, but are now widespread. A good fraction of this inequality trend is due to technology-related increases in the demand for skilled workers outstripping the growth of their supply. Since the early 1990s, labor markets have become more polarized with jobs in the middle third of the wage distribution shrinking and those in the bottom and top third rising. I argue that this is because computerization complements the most skilled tasks, but substitutes for routine tasks performed by middle wage occupations such as clerks, leaving the demand for the lowest skilled service tasks largely unaffected. Finally, I argue that technology is partly endogenous, for example it has been spurred by trade with China. Thus, trade does matter for changes in the labor market, but through a different mechanism than conventionally thought.     

The family gap in wages: What wombmates reveal

We shed new light on the effects of having children on hourly wages by exploiting access to data on the entire population of employed same-sex twins in Denmark. Our second contribution is the use of administrative data on absenteeism; the amount of hours off due to holidays and sickness. Our results suggest that childbearing reduces female hourly wages but the principal explanation is in fact mothers’ higher levels of absence. We find a positive wage premium for fathers.