ILR Impact Brief – Gender, Promotion, and Raises: Sometimes the Advantage Goes to Men

Prior studies looking at gender discrimination in the workplace, in the form of promotions and/or raises, have yielded mixed results. Research focusing on promotions has found that women are promoted less often than men, more often than men, and at equal rates. Research assessing both promotions and wages, grounded in the notion that promotions signal a status change that warrants additional compensation, has also produced no consensus on outcomes. This particular study, however, used unique data on recently hired workers at a broad sample of companies that enabled the authors to control for workers’ job performance, educational attainment, and other characteristics, as well as company characteristics such as profit/not-for-profit status, industry, establishment size, and percent of the workforce covered by a union contract in order to analyze gender differences in actual and expected promotions and accompanying wage gains

ILR Impact Brief - The Sources of International Differences in Wage Inequality

Wage inequality in the U.S. exceeds that of Canada, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. Some researchers have pointed to the higher relative rewards for higher cognitive skill and more education in the U.S. as an important cause of this difference; others emphasize the greater diversity of labor market skills within the American population. This paper uses recently collected international data on cognitive skills, earnings, age, and years of formal schooling to assess the relative importance of population heterogeneity and higher relative pay for more cognitive skill in explaining higher U.S. wage inequality

The labour market after age 50: some elements of a Franco-American comparison

This paper examines various supply and demand side aspects of the French labour market for older workers and puts them in perspective by comparing them to the US case. We first consider the supply side incentives (or disincentives) of basic pension schemes for the two countries : for France, we discuss how these incentives have been changed by the 1993 and 2003 pension reforms and we present some projections of the impact of these reforms on labour force participation rates, based on the DESTINIE dynamic microsimulation model. We then discuss, on the demand side, the hypothesis of a wage-productivity gap for older workers which could explain their lower employment rates. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis is not overwhelming. Nevertheless, workers who lose their jobs at older ages probably suffer a large loss of firm-specific and sector-specific human capital. In the US, this does not preclude re-employment, but at the cost of significant drops of wage levels. In France, the collective choice has been made since the 1970s to allow older workers who lose their jobs to completely withdraw from the labour market : these workers have access to preretirement schemes or specific dispositions of unemployment insurance (including an exemption from seeking employment). This system proved difficult to regulate. Due to these difficulties, France has not been able to do more than stabilize the employment rate in the 55-64 age bracket during the 1990s, after 20 years of continuous decline. The key unanswered question is whether it will be possible to increase the employment rate of this age group in the next two decades.Pensions, preretirement, senior workers

Do Cognitive Test Scores Explain Higher U.S. Wage Inequality?

Using microdata from the 1994-8 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) for nine countries, we examine the role of cognitive skills in explaining higher wage inequality in the United States. We find that while the greater dispersion of cognitive test scores in the United States plays a part in explaining higher U.S. wage inequality, higher labor market prices (i.e., higher returns to measured human capital and cognitive performance) and greater residual inequality still play important roles, and are, on average, quantitatively considerably more important than differences in the distribution of test scores in explaining higher U.S. wage inequality.

New Evidence on Gender Difference in Promotion Rates: An Empirical Analysis of a Sample of New Hires

Using a large sample of establishments drawn from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI) employer survey, we study gender differences in promotion rates and in the wage gains attached to promotions. Several unique features of our data distinguish our analysis from the previous literature on this topic. First, we have information on the wage increases attached to promotions, and relatively few studies on gender differences have considered promotions and wage increases together. Second, our data include job-specific worker performance ratings, allowing us to control for performance and ability more precisely than through commonly-used skill indicators such as educational attainment or tenure. Third, in addition to standard information on occupation and industry, we have data on a number of other firm characteristics, enabling us to control for these variables while still relying on a broad, representative sample, as opposed to a single firm or a similarly narrowly-defined population. Our results indicate that women have lower probabilities of promotion and expected promotion than do men but that there is essentially no gender difference in wage growth with or without promotions.

Do Cognitive Test Scores Explain Higher US Wage Inequality?

Using microdata from the 1994-6 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), we examine the role of cognitive skills in explaining higher wage inequality in the US. We find that while the greater dispersion of cognitive test scores in the US plays a part in explaining higher US wage inequality, higher labor market prices (i.e., higher returns to measured human capital and cognitive performance) and greater residual inequality still play important roles for both men and women. And we find that, on average, prices are quantitatively considerably more important than differences in the distribution of test scores in explaining the relatively high level of US wage inequality. This finding holds up when we examine natives only and when we correct for sample selection.

Substitution Between Individual and Cultural Capital: Pre-Migration Labor Supply, Culture and US Labor Market Outcomes Among Immigrant Woman

In this paper we use New Immigrant Survey data to investigate the impact of immigrant women's own labor supply prior to migrating and female labor supply in their source country to provide evidence on the role of human capital and culture in affecting their labor supply and wages in the United States. We find, as expected, that women who migrate from countries with relatively high levels of female labor supply work more in the United States. Moreover, most of this effect remains when we further control for each woman’s own labor supply prior to migrating, which itself also strongly affects labor supply in the United States. Importantly, we find a significantly negative interaction between pre-migration labor supply and source country female labor supply. We obtain broadly similar effects analyzing the determinants of hourly earnings among the employed in the United States, although the results are not always significant. These results suggest an important role for culture and norms in affecting immigrant women's labor supply, since the effect of source country female labor supply on immigrant women's US work hours is still strong even controlling for the immigrant’s own pre-migration labor supply. The negative interaction effects between previous work experience and source country female labor supply on women's US work hours and wages suggest that cultural capital and individual job-related human capital act as substitutes in affecting preparedness for work in the US.gender, immigration, labor supply, human capital