Gender pay gaps in earnings are well-documented in the literature. However, new factors contributing to women's lower earnings have emerged and remain under-researched. Educational choices are among them. We use a rich administrative dataset from Poland, a Central Eastern European country with high tertiary education enrolment and high female…

This report examines the impact of the changing landscape for job skills on gender disparities in the U.S. labor market. The analysis is based on job skills and preparation data from the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network (O*NET), specifically Version 23, released August 2018, and Version 5.1, released November 2003. O*NET…

Using the historical random assignment of MBA students to peer groups at a top business school in the United States, I study the effect of the gender composition of a student's peers on the gender pay gap at graduation and long-term labor market outcomes. I find that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of male peers leads to a 2.1 percent…

Careers in the construction trades can provide high earnings and good benefits, often through a learn-while-you-earn apprenticeship. In 2020, more than 300,000 women worked in the trades--the largest number ever. Yet while their numbers are growing, women still make up fewer than one in twenty of workers in construction occupations. This report…

In the last decades, developed economies have witnessed significant declines in wages for low-skill workers, increases in employment in high-skill occupations, rapid diffusion of new technology, and expanding offshoring opportunities. Labor markets in developed countries have reallocated labor from manual to cognitive jobs and from routine to…

Economic theories predict that women are more likely to exit the labor force if their partners' earnings are higher and if their own wage rate is lower. In this article, I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 2,254) and discrete-time event-history analysis to show that wives' relative wages are more predictive of their exit than are…

This paper attempts to explore the connections between expanding female education and the participation of women in paid employment in Japan, China and India, three of Asia's largest economies. Analysis based on existing data and literature shows that despite the large expansion in educational access in these countries in the last half century,…

This paper examines the effect of oral health on labor market outcomes by exploiting variation in fluoridated water exposure during childhood. The politics surrounding the adoption of water fluoridation by local governments suggests exposure to fluoride is exogenous to other factors affecting earnings. Exposure to fluoridated water increases…

After a long decline, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of older men in the United States leveled off in the 1980s, and began to increase in the late 1990s. We examine how changes in Social Security rules affected these trends. We attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s-80s to the increasing generosity of Social…

Current Population Survey data from 1979 and 1991 were used to decompose changes in the gender wage gap into three components: skill distribution, wage structure, and improvements in women's position. Relative wage gains by women may have been a source of increasing wage inequality among men. (SK)

Deals with three aspects of the part-time employment pattern of working wives: (1) the wives' characteristics, (2) the level and structure of their earnings in part-time jobs, and (3) the duration of their employment when part-time jobs are available to them. (Author/CT)

Using data on 271 jobs, a study showed that both worker characteristics (education, months employed or unemployed) and job characteristics (skills, mental and physical demands, tools) are determinants of pay. Females tend to hold jobs of lower value to the organization, which explains part of the male-female pay differential. (SK)

Efforts to shift women from welfare into the labor market will not necessarily move women out of poverty because the wages they are likely to earn are so low. According to research tracking Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients over a 2-year period, 43% of AFDC recipients combine welfare with a substantial amount of paid…

A study used data for the 1987 calendar year from the 1986 and 1987 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the impact of union membership on women's wages and job tenure. The data set included 17,200 sample members, representing about 79 million workers, aged 16-64. The study mapped the distribution of union…

Data on women in labor unions in 1988 reveal the following facts: (1) women are becoming an increasingly important part of membership in organized labor, as the total number of workers in unions declines; (2) in 1988, nearly 6 million of the 47.5 million employed women in the United States, or about 13 percent, were members of unions; (3) since…