Barbara Petrongolo

Unequal Pay or Unequal Employment? A Cross-Country Analysis of Gender Gaps

We analyze gender wage gaps correcting for sample selection induced by nonemployment. We recover wages for the nonemployed using alternative imputation techniques, simply requiring assumptions on the position of imputed wages with respect to the median. We obtain higher median wage gaps on imputed rather than actual wage distributions for several OECD countries. However, this difference is small in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most central and northern EU countries and becomes sizable in southern EU countries, where gender employment gaps are high. Selection correction explains nearly half of the observed negative correlation between wage and employment gaps.

The Part-Time Pay Penalty for Women in Britain

Women in Britain who work part-time have, on average, hourly earnings about 25% less than that of women working full-time. This gap has widened greatly over the past 30 years. This paper tries to explain this part-time pay penalty. It shows that a sizeable part of the penalty can be explained by the differing characteristics of FT and PT women. Inclusion of standard demographics halves the estimate of the pay penalty. But inclusion of occupation makes the pay penalty very small, suggesting that almost the entire unexplained gap is due to occupational segregation. The rise in the pay penalty over time is partly a result of a rise in occupational segregation and partly the general rise in wage inequality. Policies to reduce the pay penalty have had little effect and it is likely that it will not change much unless better jobs can be made available on a part-time basis.

Skill mismatch and unemployment in OECD countries

This paper uses evidence on employment, labour force, and wage differentials by skills from a number of OECD countries to investigate on the characteristics and the consequences of a skill-biased shift in the structure of labour demand and labour supply. A convex relationship between wages bargained and unemployment is adopted as the non-competitive element that allows such sectoral shocks to have aggregate effects. The model is then calibrated using US and British data. The analysis predicts that nearly half of the increase in unemployment experience in Britain over the past two decades can be attributed to an unbalanced evolution in demand and supply of skills, while in the US the impact of this imbalance was fully offset by counter-acting forces.

Gender Segregation in Employment Contracts

This paper presents evidence on gender segregation in employment contracts in 15 E.U. countries, using microdata from the ECHPS. Women are overrepresented in part-time jobs in all countries considered, but while in northern Europe such allocation roughly reflects womens preferences and their need to combine work with child care, in southern Europe part-time jobs are often involuntary and provide significantly lower job satisfaction than full-time ones. Women are also overrepresented in fixed-term contracts in southern Europe, and again this job allocation cannot be explained by preferences or productivity differentials between the two genders. There is thus a largely unexplained residual in the gender job allocation, which may be consistent with some degree of discrimination in a few of the labor markets considered, especially in southern Europe. (JEL: J22, J28, J71) Copyright (c) 2004 The European Economic Association.

Scale Effects in Markets with Search

Estimates of aggregate matching functions may miss important scale effects in frictional labour markets because of the reactions of job seekers to scale. We estimate a semi-structural model of search and matching on a British sample of unemployed people, testing for scale effects on the probability of receiving an offer and on the distribution of wage offers. We find them only in wage offers but we also find that reservation wages rise to deliver higher post-unemployment wages but not faster matches. So aggregate matching functions should be unaffected by scale but wage equations should be showing them.

Reemployment Probabilities and Returns to Matching

The assumption of constant returns in the matching function, embodied in most bilateral search models, is crucial to ensure the uniqueness of the unemployment rate along a steady‐state growth path. This article explores the empirical viability of this assumption by estimating individual reemployment probabilities on a sample of unemployment entrants. I apply hazard models to survey data on both completed and uncompleted unemployment durations. The hypothesis of constant returns to matching is not rejected, on the basis of the evidence that the job‐finding hazard depends only on local labor market tightness and is independent of its size.

Firing costs and stigma: A theoretical analysis and evidence from microdata

Abstract This paper studies the effects of firing costs when there is imperfect information about worker productivity. We argue that firing costs affect the way in which firms form expectations about worker productivity from their employment history. In addition to the standard effect of firing costs, our model shows that a firing tax increases the stigma suffered by dismissed workers, reducing their re-employment prospects. On the other hand, firing costs raise firms’ hiring standards, and the expected productivity of those who have never been hired improves. Using microdata on labor market transitions, we test and confirm the models prediction that firing costs reduce re-employment prospects of dismissed workers by increasing the stigma associated with job loss.

European versus US unemployment: different responses to increased demand for skill?

According to Paul Krugman, “the European unemployment problem and the US inequality problem are two sides of the same coin”. In other words, both continents have had the same shift in demand towards skill; in the US relative wages have adjusted and in Europe not. The implication of this hypothesis is that in Europe the unemployment rate for the unskilled will have risen but the unemployment rate for the skilled will have fallen. In fact it has risen. To investigate the hypothesis more systematically we develop an internally consistent model which allocates the change in a country’s unemployment between that resulting from (a) shifts in relative demand for skill minus shifts in relative supply, (b) shifts in the relative intercepts of skilled and unskilled wage functions, (c) shifts in aggregate wage pressure. We show that the rise in British unemployment relative to the US since the 1970s is almost certainly due to shifts in aggregate wage pressure. Similarly for 5 other European countries the combination of (a) and (b) accounts for none of the increase in unemployment since the 1970s.

Labour Supply and Incentives to Work in Europe

Labour Supply and Incentives to Work in Europe highlights recent developments in the labour supply in Europe and gives a detailed assessment of their link with economic policies and labour market institutions. Despite major changes in European labour supply during the past few decades, the existing literature still lacks a comprehensive study of the relationship between labour supply and labour market institutions from a macro perspective.

School-leaving and unemployment: evidence from Spain and the UK

Human Capital Over the Life Cycle synthesises comparative research on the processes of human capital formation in the areas of education and training in Europe, in relation to the labour market. The book proposes that one of the most important challenges faced by Europe today is to understand the link between education and training on the one hand and economic and social inequality on the other. The authors focus the analysis on three main aspects of the links between education and social inequality: educational inequality, differences in access to labour markets and differences in lifelong earnings and training.