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This thesis investigates issues related to gender inequalities and scarring effects in school to work transitions. The first chapter analyses the gender earnings gap among Italian college graduates at the beginning of their careers. Thanks to the richness of the dataset used I am able to control for a large set of variables related to individuals' educational and family background, as well as personality traits. The main finding is that the content of the college degree course is the most signicant variable in explaining the earnings gender differentials of young workers. In particular I show that female sorting in college majors characterised by a low maths content explains between 13 and 16% of the earnings gender gap. Motivated by this result, in Chapter 2 I investigate the determinants of gender gaps in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) graduation rates, with an emphasis on family, cultural and school influences. I show that half of the gap is attributed to the gender difference in maths and science content of the high school curriculum. The results indicate that in Italy the issue of the gender gap in STEM graduation has its roots in a gendered choice that originates many years before. The final chapter analyses the extent to which the mismatch of demand and supply of skills that young workers face when they enter the labour market upon completing education affects their careers. Regression results show that there is a long lasting negative effect of these initial conditions on labour market outcomes. The evidence is suggestive of a `trickle down unemployment' phenomenon, namely that high-skill workers try to escape strong competition from their high-skill peers by taking jobs for which a lower level of education is required, moving down the occupational ladder.

Using data from 1999 on immigrants in Sweden, we find that the gender earnings gap among immigrant is lower than natives’ gender earnings gap and negatively related to their source country gender earnings gap. We also show that immigrants’ earnings are lower and more concentrated than the natives’ ones which leads to a lower gender earnings gap for immigrants. Then, regarding the gender earnings gap along the earnings distribution and linking it with earnings distribution of immigrants and natives, we are able to conclude that immigrants are not strongly affected by the glass ceiling effect since they are not present in the upper tail of the distribution. We reach the conclusion that such gender earnings gap differences between natives and immigrants may be explained by selection in the labour force participation, occupational segregation of immigrants, source country culture and discrimination.

Whereas the effect of motherhood on women’s earnings has been well documented, little research has been done in Canada exploring the impact of fatherhood on men’s earnings. Although international research has shown that, unlike women, men who have a child increase their earnings, a growing body of research suggests that this benefit may be mediated by whether or not the father takes a parental leave. Using the 2011 General Social Survey (GSS) on family issues and employing ordinary least squares regression I investigate whether fathers receive an earnings bonus compared to childless men and whether fathers who take paternity/ parental leave earn less than fathers who do not. Our findings show that after controlling for personal and work related characteristics fathers earn significantly more than childless men and fathers who took paternity/parental leave earn significantly less than fathers who did not. Potential explanations for these earnings gaps are discussed.

This thesis investigates the nature, extent and dynamics of informal employment in the Turkish labor market using 2006-2009 Turkish Income and Living Conditions Survey. It is mainly a collection of three essays. In the first essay, an attempt is made to analyze the relevance and implications of three alternative characterizations of informality which include an enterprise-based definition associating informality with small firms, an extended enterprise-based definition incorporating social security protection, and a definition based exclusively on social security coverage. Using probit analysis, we show that social security criterion is the best measure given its ability to capture key relationships between individual characteristics and informality. In the second essay, we compute Markov transition probabilities of individuals moving across six labor market states, then estimate multinomial logit regressions to identify underlying dynamics of variant mobility patterns. Confirming traditional theory which sees formal employment as the ultimate desirable state, we find that formal-salaried individuals are the most reluctant to move and that the probability of transition from informal-salaried state to formal-salaried state is five times that of reverse transition. In the third essay, we examine formal/informal employment earnings differentials. OLS estimation of standard Mincerian equations reveals an informal penalty, half of which can be explained by observable characteristics. Moreover, applying fixed effects regressions, we show that unobserved individual fixed effects when combined with controls for observable individual and employment characteristics explain the pay differentials entirely.

How did the Italian mafia affect honest Italian descendants on the American labor market? This is a study about how an exogenous shock to ethnic discrimination on the labor market affected a whole ethnic group. The goal with this study is to analyze how a massacre by Al Capone’s crew in 1929 affected Italian workers on the American labor market. Using linked census-data of all working-age men 1920-30, this paper studies the ethnic discrimination of second-generation Italian immigrants. The treatment group is Italian men, and the control groups are other immigrants and natives. Three different outcome variables will be used, employment, wage employment, and self-employment. The results suggest that Italians saw lower chances of being employed, lower chances of being wage employed, and higher chances of being self-employed post 1930 compared to other immigrants and natives. This suggest that Italians were forced into self-employment. A conclusion that the ethnic discrimination towards Italians is a result of the tragic massacre cannot be made due to no data on the news distribution. The news distribution system in America could give an indication on how the news were shown in surrounding areas and this could therefore reflect the employers’ attitudes towards Italians. Further studies are therefore required in order to conclude if the massacre gave Italians a harder time on the labor market or not but for now, we have an indication on that Italians were more affected post 1930 compared to other immigrants and natives.

The earnings gap between men and women, an apt indicator of women's status relative to men's, was roughly constant for the thirty-five years between 1950 and 1985. During this period women earned about 60 to 65 cents for every dollar earned by men. The purpose of this study is to analyze the determinants of this wage gap. Because much existing research suggests that a large portion of the gender gap in pay results from the segregation of women into low-paying jobs, the present study focuses on the role of gender segregation in the workplace. Other potential contributors to the earnings gap are also examined (women's domestic obligations, educational attainment, women's labor force participation rates, and the industrial mix in Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas). The position of women as a group in the labor market is of primary interest in this research. Accordingly, the analysis was conducted on an aggregate level across labor markets. The data were drawn from the Bureau of the Census Census of the Population: 1980—Detailed Population Characteristics. The project uses a cross-sectional research design, the primary statistical technique used being multiple regression analysis. Findings reveal that workplace segregation and the industrial characteristics of SMSA labor markets have the strongest effect on the size of the gender-based earnings gap. Specifically, workplace segregation is positively related to the size of the earnings gap between men and women. The presence of above average levels of manufacturing activity in an SMSA is associated with a larger earnings gap while the presence of above average levels of service sector and government employment opportunities in an SMSA is associated with smaller earnings differentials between men and women. This study enhances the understanding of the effects of structural variables on the earnings determination process for men and women and provides insight into the collective situation of women in the labor market.

My dissertation consists of three essays on the Korean labor market. The first essay studies how the extensive provision of maternity leave and childcare leave in Korea affects the employment and wages of young women. This reform is expected to increase the labor supply and decrease the labor demand for young women. As a result, the mean wage of young women should fall. But the direction of the change in their employment probability is hard to infer because it depends on the relative magnitudes of the shifts of the labor supply and demand curves. A difference-in-difference-in-differences model having older women, older men, and young men simultaneously as the control group suggests that neither the employment nor the hourly wages of young women are affected. The second essay explores why married men have higher hourly earnings and employment propensity than otherwise comparable single men. In a fixed effects regression, which controls for the selection of more productive men into marriage, married men do not experience faster growth in earnings and employment rate before marriage. Rather, when marriage takes place, the earnings of married men start increasing relative to those of single men. Also, that South Korean men have a greater earnings growth after marriage than U.S. men is consistent with the national difference in the degree of specialization within married households. Married men are more likely to work than single men only for the first few years of marriage, and single men outperform married men afterwards. The final essay studies why gender differences in earnings and earnings growth exist among new Korean college graduates before women take time off of work for marriage and motherhood. I find that women do not face an initial earnings gap after graduating college compared to men who finished military service. The lower earnings that women receive can be entirely explained by the difference in age at graduation between men and women. However, women's earnings grow slower than those of men who finished military service. This is partly because a greater percentage of women graduate from colleges of education, which provide slower earnings growth than other types of colleges. Most of the gender difference in earnings growth remains unexplained. / text