This dissertation examines the effects of career interruptions on workers’ wages. In chapter four I examine whether controlling for the type of interruption differently affects men’s and women’s wages and therefore can be used to explain the remaining gender wage differences. The increased participation of married women in the labor force has increased their wages from just 30% of men’s wages in 1890 to nearly 80% as of 2001. Thus, although the gender wage gap has narrowed over time, it has yet to be eliminated. One argument for the persistence of the gender wage gap is that previously researchers have used poor measures of experience to estimate men’s and women’s wages. Although previous studies have made strides in measuring experience, including controls for the timing of work experience, the gender wage gap persists. I extend the wage-gap literature by including controls for the types of interruptions men and women encounter. Because they typically experience different types of interruptions, I examine whether the varying types affect wages differently. I control for the types of interruptions and find similar effects for men’s and women’s wages. My study shows that types of job interruptions do not explain the remaining wage differentials. The fifth chapter extends from the fourth chapter by including controls for all periods of unpaid leave from work. I examine whether wage differences exist between workers who return to their current employer post-interruption versus those who change employers post-interruption. I find differences in the wage effects from different types of unpaid leave for men and women. Chapter six extends from previous chapters by including controls for all periods of paid leave from work in addition to unpaid leaves from work. I examine whether depreciation effects occur when women spend time out of work but receive compensation through paid maternity leaves. I find no evidence that time out of work because of paid maternity leaves depreciates skills.

Do men and women receive different pay-offs, in terms of wage, from cognitive skills in the Swedish labor market? To answer this, the classical Mincer equation is expanded with a variable for cognitive skills (literacy and numeracy) and an interaction term between being a male and cognitive skills to be able to distinguish the actual difference in pay-off. I use data from OECD’s PIAAC survey of adult skills, which provides a unique opportunity to examine gender pay-off differences concerning cognitive skills. The results show that men have a larger pay-off than women once occupation is sufficiently controlled for

Everywhere around the world, whether in developing or developed countries, women earn less than men. This phenomenon is in no way new and it has been investigated for many years. Still, in today’s modern society, the wage gap does not appear to be closing. In times of economic instability, such as the economic crisis, the progress towards equality may be pushed back, since specific groups, sectors, and occupations may be affected differently. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the Italian gender wage gap with a closer look at the fluctuations during the period of the financial crisis. In order to analyse and understand the fluctuations of the pay gap, the three main theories used in the research are the human capital theory, occupational segregation, and theories regarding the labour market structure. By applying the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method, this study analyses to what extent the gap could be explained by differences in observable characteristics, such as level of education or age, and how much remains unexplained. The empirical model is applied to the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) microdata between the period of 2002 and 2016. The main findings show that the Italian gender wage gap, for the most part, remains unexplained. This indicates that the differentials in pay cannot be accounted for by differences in observable characteristics, such as education, age, contract type. The results of this research show that the Italian wage gap was, to some extent, negatively affected by the financial crisis. Furthermore, implemented austerity measures were found not to have significant negative impacts on the gap, which only increased in the initial phase of the crisis.

No description available.

This dissertation consists of three chapters concerning topics in economic history and labor economics. The first chapter studies how the 1906 San Francisco Fire impacted the biographies of those who lost their homes in the fire, while the second chapter shows that destination quality is a key determinant for the returns to childhood migration. The third chapter proposes a novel strategy to estimate the gender wage gap. The first chapter explores the short- and long-run consequences of the 1906 San Francisco Fire, one of the largest urban fires in American history. I use linked US Census records to follow San Francisco residents and their sons from 1900 to 1940. Implementing a spatial regression discontinuity design across the boundary of the razed district to identify the effect of the fire, I find that the fire displaced households away from San Francisco in the short- and medium-term, it forced men into lower-paying occupations, and out of entrepreneurship. Constructing a novel measure of kin presence, I provide suggestive evidence for risk-sharing among extended family in San Francisco, which mitigated the disruptive effects of the fire. While individuals recover over time in many dimensions, the negative effect on business ownership is persistent over decades. Moreover, affected children have lower educational attainment. Therefore, my findings reject the hope for a “reversal of fortune” for the victims, in contrast to what is found for more recent natural disasters such as hurricane Katrina. In the second chapter, I show that destination quality, measured as average educational attainment among permanent residents, is a key determinant for the returns to childhood migration in Indonesia. First, I document that average differences in educational outcomes are small between children who moved domestically and those who did not. However, conditional on having migrated, destination turns out to be very important. Exploiting variation in the age of migration, I show that children who spend more time growing up in better districts have higher graduation rates and more years of completed schooling. These effects are persistent and result in better labor market outcomes. In the third chapter (joint with Hannah Illing and Linh Tô), we propose a novel strategy to estimate the gender wage gap by comparing men and women who succeed each other in the same job position. We identify unexpected worker deaths in German social security data in 1980-2019, and then compute the wage gap between the deceased worker and their successor for different gender combinations. We find that holding the job position constant, men who replace deceased women earn substantially higher wages. The opposite is true when women follow deceased men. The implied "replacement gender wage gap" in the 1980 to 2019 period is about 15 to 19 percent. In addition, we find that the gap has decreased over time, and it is higher in West Germany compared to East Germany.

This thesis analyzes the relation between female representation in private sector decision-making positions and the two predicted variables: the gender wage gap and the average female private-sector wage. Using regional data for Sweden’s 290 municipalities during the year 2014- 2018, OLS and panel fixed effect regression analysis is performed. A gender wage gap exists in all of Sweden’s municipalities. It is found that an increase in the representation of female decision-makers in the private sector significantly adds to the narrowing of the gender wage gap. The relation between female representation in private sector decision-making and average female wages is not found significant. Municipalities can use these findings as motivations for the importance of promoting female managers and when working to reduce the stigma and social norms surrounding females in decision-making positions.

The analysis studies the spill-over effect of the gender equality of the trading partner on the gender wage gap. The aim is to contribute to the gender aspect of the literature studying the effect of globalisation on wage inequality, and especially to the very limited literature on the spill-over effect of the trading partner. It uses a European multi-country approach and analyses both exports and imports, which has not been done previously. For the empirical analysis, cross-country panel data is used to construct a fixed effects model. The results show a strong positive effect on the gender wage gap for both exports and imports, although the effect is stronger for imports. It indicates that a change in the gender equality of the trading partners has a significant effect on the gender wage gap. Furthermore, the analysisis extended to also analyse the explaining mechanisms raised by the literature. The results give an indication that certain groups based on technology intensity are driving the results, implying that the explaining mechanism could be the adoption of technology favoring women, but needs further research to draw any conclusions. All in all, the results provide evidence on the existence of a spill-over effect and highlights the importance of including both imports and exports for further research into the explaining mechanisms.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(経済学) / 甲第23669号 / 経博第652号 / 新制||経||300(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院経済学研究科経済学専攻 / (主査)教授 山田 憲, 教授 西山 慶彦, 准教授 高野 久紀 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Economics / Kyoto University / DGAM

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The gender inequality in the labor market has long been a discussed and studied topic, and today it is acknowledged that women are discriminated against and face disadvantages in earnings compared to men. This study aims to further investigate if immigrant women face additional earnings differentials due to their ethnicity, more specifically in the Norwegian labor market. By using census data on incomes from a 2019 wave in Norway, this dissertation runs two separate regressions including variables based on diverse socio-demographic characteristics to estimate the regression. Results show that there are evident differences in wages for being a woman and being an immigrant, as the first regression gives statistically significant evidence of negative correlations between logarithmic income and the variables gender and immigrational status. In order to answer the research question an interaction variable is added. The interaction variable, female*immigr, gives statistically significant results in the second regression. The positive estimate of the interaction variable between being a female and being an immigrant implies that immigrant women actually have a smaller disadvantage than native women regarding the gender wage gap of wage earnings. This estimate proves the opposite of our hypothesis and previous research. Furthermore, male immigrants tend to show a greater wage disadvantage than immigrant women. When separating the regression by gender and adding new variables, the outcome implies that men’s wages are more positively affected by being married compared to women. Women on the other hand are more positively affected by educational level. However, women face a larger disadvantage if also being immigrants when moving up the educational ladder, while men practically keep a constant correlation regardless of educational level. The findings from this dissertation moreover provides support for the notion of discrimination on wages as an important factor behind gender differentials in the Norwegian labor market.