Economic transition and gender differentials in wages and productivity: Evidence from Chinese manufacturing enterprises

We use firm-level data to analyze male–female wage differences in Chinese industry in the late 1990s. Our estimates indicate that employers' discrimination against women was not a significant source of the gender wage gap in Chinese state-owned enterprises. Instead, we find that the relative wage of unskilled female to male workers was higher than their relative productivity. This result indicates that unskilled female workers in the state sector had historically received wage premiums and consequently accounted for a disproportionate share of the sector's labor surplus.     

Employers' recruitment behaviour and vacancy duration: an empirical analysis for the Dutch labour market

The functioning of labour markets from a demand-side perspective is examined. In particular, the determinants of vacancy duration are studied in the context of a model of employers' search behaviour. A model for the choice of the recruitment strategy at the start of the search process and the corresponding recruitment duration is developed in which allowance is made for different patterns of duration dependence for each recruitment strategy. This model is applied to data on employers' search behaviour in the Dutch labour market. It is found that employers prefer advertisements as the first recruitment channel when applicants are required to have work experience. Moreover, employers prefer to start searching via the labour exchange office when jobs in the secondary segment of the labour market have to be filled. It is also found that - when advertisements are used as the first recruitment strategy - employers need some time to acquire a pool of applicants and to select candidates from this pool. It is interesting as a contrast that applicants seem to be evaluated rather quickly if employers start searching via informal contacts.     

A TEST OF EMPLOYER DISCRIMINATION IN THE NBA

This paper presents a test of an important implication of Becker's theory of employer discrimination: when institutional change enhances labor mobility, employer discrimination falls because it becomes more costly for employers to indulge tastes for discrimination. The test case is the National Basketball Association (NBA). This paper specifically addresses the following question about the NBA: why did black/white player salary differentials vanish by the early 1990s? Previous studies claim that NBA wage gaps in the 1980s are attributable to customer discrimination and monopsonistic wage discrimination. This study argues that employer discrimination was an important source of those gaps and that one reason they vanished was because reduced monopsony power eradicated employer discrimination. Monopsony power fell because the 1988 NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement and the entry of four new teams in the league enhanced player mobility and increased the amount of labor market competition. Using data for the 1985-86 and 1990-91 seasons, employer discrimination was proxied by the race of the team's general manager. Empirical results strongly suggest that a major reason the NBA wage gap vanished in the later period was because of a reduction in employers' ability to discriminate. This is in contrast to earlier literature on the NBA, which has tended to emphasize the role of customer discrimination. (JEL J71)     

International Trade and Gender Wage Discrimination: Evidence from East Asia

The paper explores how competition from international trade affects gender wage discrimination in two open economies. According to neoclassical theory, if discrimination is costly, then increased industry competitiveness from international trade lessens the incentive for employers to discriminate against women. This effect should be stronger in concentrated sectors, where employers can use excess profits to cover the costs of discrimination. Alternatively, increased international trade may reduce women's bargaining power to achieve wage gains. Results for Taiwan and Korea indicate that, in contrast to neoclassical theory, competition from foreign trade in concentrated industries is positively associated with wage discrimination against women.     

Gender Wage Gap: Some Recent Evidences from India

Gender wage inequality is a chronic socioeconomic malice in developed as well as in developing countries. This paper describes the outcomes of our study on the estimation of gender wage gap in the Indian labour market, using the 68th Round NSSO employment–unemployment data. The study uses Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition technique and Heckman two-step methodology, for removal of selectivity bias in the sample data, to measure the components of total gender wage gap, viz. (1) occupational segregation (explained by economic rationale) and (2) direct discrimination (not explained by economic rationale). The analysis indicates that the maximum direct discrimination is for job-related factors, such as industry type which are controlled by employers. The majority of the Indian employers today are men, which may be the reason for the insensitivity to the chronic direct discrimination against women in workplaces. The study also indicates that most of the explained gender wage gap is due to lower skill and experience amongst women. The findings suggest that besides labour law reforms for ensuring gender neutrality in workplaces, focused government policies for promoting women entrepreneurship and skill development of women are urgently required for reducing the gender wage gap in India.

     

Internal trade,productivity and interconnected industries: A quantitative analysis

Does trade within a country affect welfare and productivity? What are the magnitude and consequences of costs to such trade? To answer these questions, we exploit unique Canadian data to measure internal trade costs in a variety of ways—they are large and vary across sectors and provinces. To quantify their consequences for welfare and productivity, we use a recent multi‐sector trade model featuring rich input–output relationships. We find interprovincial trade is an important contributor to Canada's GDP and welfare, though there are significant costs to such trade. Reducing interprovincial trade costs by 10% yields aggregate gains of 0.9%; eliminating our preferred estimates of costs, gains average between 3% and 7%—equivalent to real GDP gains between $50 billion and $130 billion. Finally, as policy reforms are often sector specific, we liberalize sectors one at a time and find gains are largest in highly interconnected industries.     

A REAPPRAISAL OF THE INCIDENCE OF EMPLOYER CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIAL SECURITY IN JAPAN

This paper reappraises Tachibanaki and Yokoyama (2008)—an empirical analysis indicating no apparent backward shifting of employer social insurance contributions—by modifying their empirical strategy. First, we control for a spurious positive correlation between wages and employers' contribution rates by trend variables. Second, we utilize a cross‐sectional variation in the contribution rate of workers' compensation insurance. Third, we exclude two industries from our sample to remove sampling errors in wages. Our results indicate that the social insurance burden shifts back onto employees to some extent, contrary to Tachibanaki and Yokoyama (2008). Our finding is consistent with other existing studies.     

Asymmetric information, strategic behavior, and discrimination in the labor market

Summary  The neoclassical model of labor market discrimination assumes the presence of either prejudiced preferences, biased assessments of worker productivity, or monopsony power. We show that when market agents control asymmetric information, strategic behavior can induce discriminatory hiring practices even when these market features are absent. Moreover, strategic interaction many distort public policies to the point of harming the segments of the work force they were designed to support. Received: January 3, 1996 revised version April 29, 1996     

Statistical Discrimination and Gender Wage Gap: A Model

In this paper, I extend the model in Coate and Loury (CL) (1993) to show how statistical discrimination by employers can help create gender wage gap for men and women with equal earning potentials. Given that employers do not perfectly observe a worker’s skill type and partly rely on the average skills level of his (her) peers for inference purpose, employers’ differential treatment of male and female workers can create different skill-investment incentives for them, which in turn justify employers’ discrimination in the first place. The second result of this paper which is not possible within the original CL framework is that I point to the possibility that there exist circumstances under which the gender wage gap can not be eliminated without the formerly advantaged sex being negatively affected.     

The Gender Impact of Social Protection Policies: A Critical Review of the Evidence

Abstract

Over the course of the neoliberal era, social protection policies have been transformed dramatically; these changes have had profound gender implications. Since the early 1980s, welfare state regimes around the world have shifted away from ‘universalism' towards ‘targeting'. More recently, there has been a further shift—especially in industrialized countries—away from the male-breadwinner to the adult worker model. Despite the progressivity implied by this latter shift, important issues of gender inequality remain unresolved (even in Nordic countries where levels of gender equity are higher than elsewhere). This paper presents a critical review of social protection policies, examined from a gender perspective. The analysis presents a conceptual framework on gender and the welfare state, and examines the experience of major industrialized and developing countries in engendering social policy. In particular, this paper provides a careful examination of care-related programs, since this domain is particularly important to understanding the gendered effects of social protection policies. Finally, the gendered implications of the global crisis and subsequent policy measures are examined.     

The brokerage system in the brick kiln industry in Tamil Nadu,India

We have led a survey in brick kilns in the state of Tamil Nadu, India, to study the phenomenon of intermediation in the process of recruiting seasonal migrants who are employed for implementing the production. Henceforth, we show that intermediaries play a central role in this industry by simultaneously coordinating the actions of the supply and demand of labor and credit in the interlinked credit-labor market. The role of brokers in this industry is ambiguous in the sense that they are at the same time close to workers and yet they are subjugated to employers. There are two kinds of brokers: the broker-brokers and the broker-workers. The former have better bargaining power than the later, so they are in a better position to defend their employers' interest than the broker-workers.     

Do Employers' Responses to Crises Impact Men and Women Differently? Firm‐level Evidence from Indonesia

Do employers' responses to crises impact men and women differently? Using manufacturing census data from Indonesia this paper assesses gender differences in the impact of the East Asian crisis and to what extent these were due to differential treatment of men and women within firms and gender sorting across firms that varied in their exposure to the crisis. On average, women experienced higher job losses than their male colleagues within the same firm. However, the aggregate adverse effect of such differential treatment was more than offset by women being disproportionately employed in firms hit relatively less hard by the crisis. The null hypothesis that there were no gender differences in wage adjustment is not rejected.     

Employment expectations and uncertainties ahead of the new German minimum wage

This article analyzes announcement effects of the new statutory minimum wage on employment expectations and uncertainties in Germany. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach applied to the IAB Establishment Panel, employers affected by the minimum wage show an increased employment uncertainty and a 0.9% points drop in their expected employment growth. Using the same identification strategy with data from 2015, the treatment effect on actual employment growth of affected employers matches the employers' expectation. Hence, an analysis of employer expectations seems to be promising to detect employment effects of policy changes before they come into force.     

Working Time and the Impact of Policy Institutions: Reforming the Overtime Hours Law and Regulation

This paper analyzes implications for worker well-being if legislation in the U.S. Congress is passed permitting employers and non-supervisory employees who agree to substitute future compensatory time off in lieu of premium pay for overtime work, calculated over an 80-hour two-week standard. The impact on worker welfare is predicted applying augmented worker utility and employer demand for hours functions. Plausible inter-temporal scenarios suggest that unless workers gain more control over the timing of their overtime and comp time hours, they are likely to experience a net loss in welfare. This will occur to the extent employers use the new overtime regulation to vary work hours and schedules more closely with fluctuations in output demand as opposed to better customizing work hours to fit workers' needs to balance work with competing demands on their time, that is, adopting a short rather than longer-run time horizon regarding the restraint of labor costs. Alternative policies are more likely to raise welfare.     

Price Discrimination in Public Healthcare

Could a public healthcare system use price discrimination—paying medical service providers different fees, depending on the service provider's quality—lead to improvements in social welfare? We show that differentiating medical fees by quality increases social welfare relative to uniform pricing (i.e. quality‐invariant fee schedules) whenever hospitals and doctors have private information about their own ability. We also show that by moving from uniform to differentiated medical fees, the public healthcare system can effectively incentivise good doctors and hospitals (i.e. low‐cost‐types) to provide even higher levels of quality than they would under complete information. In the socially optimal quality‐differentiated medical fee system, low‐cost‐type medical‐service providers enjoy a rent due to their informational advantage. Informational rent is socially beneficial because it gives service providers a strong incentive to invest in the extra training required to deliver high‐quality services at low cost, providing yet another efficiency gain from quality‐differentiated medical fees.     

Does affirmative action reduce gender discrimination and enhance efficiency? New experimental evidence

We investigate experimentally the impact of quota policies on gender discrimination in hiring decisions by testing whether affirmative action increases female employment. We also ask whether firm performance is affected by such policies. Our experiment consists of three treatments. In the baseline (no quota) treatment, groups of two employers and six potential job candidates are formed. Employers have to hire two workers based on information on candidate characteristics including gender and years and subject of study. The second, low penalty, treatment is identical to the baseline except there is a quota such that at least half of the employees hired must be women. If this quota is not respected, the firm has to pay a penalty. The last, high penalty, treatment is the same as the low penalty treatment except that the penalty is significantly higher. We find that women are ranked unfavorably in the absence of a quota, and the introduction of a quota significantly reduces gender discrimination. Firm performance is not affected by the introduction of quotas.     

The Gender Gap

The author explains the “gender gap” as a Nash equilibrium of a game with incomplete information about women's work at home and in the marketplace. Expectations about women's lower wages leads to the overutilization of women in the household, and this, in turn, leads to lower productivity and lower wages for women in the marketplace. The situation is rational but generally Pareto inferior. With logistic learning by doing, at high levels of skill there is a Pareto‐superior equilibrium, where men and women share efforts equally at home and receive the same pay in the marketplace, firms enhance their profits, and there is more welfare at home. Inequity at home breeds inequity in the marketplace and, reciprocally, inequity in the marketplace leads to inequity at home, causing a persistent gender gap. Appropriate contracts may be needed to implement the superior solution, since generally governments do not intervene in family matters.     

The Costs of Financial Crises: Resource Misallocation,Productivity, and Welfare in the 2001 Argentine Crisis

Financial crises in emerging market countries appear to be very costly: both output and a host of partial welfare indicators decline dramatically. The magnitude of these costs is puzzling both from an accounting perspective – factor usage does not decline as much as output, resulting in large falls in measured productivity – and from a theoretical perspective. With the aim of resolving this puzzle, we present a framework that allows us to do the following. First, we account for changes in a country's measured productivity during a financial crisis as the result of changes in the underlying technology of the economy, the efficiency with which resources are allocated across sectors, and the efficiency of the resource allocation within sectors, driven both by reallocation amongst existing plants and by entry and exit. Second, we measure the change in the country's welfare resulting from changes in productivity, government spending, the terms of trade, and a country's international investment position. We apply this framework to the Argentine crisis of 2001 using a unique establishment level dataset and we find that more than half of the, roughly, 10 percent decline in measured total factor productivity can be accounted for by deteriorations in the allocation of resources both across and within sectors. We measure the decline in welfare to be of the order of one‐quarter of one year's gross domestic product.     

Wage Discrimination in India's Informal Labor Markets: Exploring the Impact of Caste and Gender

Although there has been considerable interest in wage discrimination in India, available studies have largely dealt with formal rather than informal markets that are of little relevance for the poorest people. Focusing on India's informal labor markets leads to three findings of interest. First, gender wage discrimination is larger in informal than in formal labor markets, resulting in losses that are larger than receipts from one of the country's most important safety‐net programs. Second, economic growth will not make gender discrimination in wage labor markets disappear. Finally, contrary to what is found for gender, the hypothesis of no significant wage discrimination based on caste cannot be rejected.     

Male–female wage discrimination in Chinese industryInvestigation using firm‐level data1

We use firm‐level data to analyze male–female wage discrimination in China's industry. We find that there is a significant negative association between wages and the share of female workers in a firm's labour force. However, we also find that the marginal productivity of female workers is significantly lower than that of male workers. Comparing wage gaps and productivity gaps between men and women, we notice an intriguing contrast between state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms. The wage gap is smaller than the productivity gap in SOEs, while the converse is true for private firms. These results suggest that women in the state sector receive wage premiums, whereas women in the private sector face wage discrimination.