Topic Labor and Employment

Selection into Employment and the Gender Wage Gap across the Distribution and over Time

Using quantile regression methods, this paper analyses the gender wage gap across the wage distribution and over time (1990-2014), while controlling for changing sample selection into full-time employment. Our findings show that the selection-corrected gender wage gap is much larger than the one observed in the data, which is mainly due to large positive selection of women into full-time employment. ...

The Gender Pay Gap Begins to Increase Sharply at Age of 30

The gender pay gap increases with age: While the average gross hourly wage gap between male and female 30-year-olds is nine percent, the gap triples to 28 percent by the age of 50. This stark increase is due to differences in employment behavior in the decades between the ages of 30 and 50. Beginning at age 30, women often switch to part-time work to be able to provide childcare, whereas men tend to ...

Parental Leave Reform and Long-Run Earnings of Mothers

Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women's employment rates but decrease their wages in case of extended leave durations. In view of these potential trade-offs, many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major parental leave reform on mothers' long-term earnings. The 2007 German parental leave reform replaced a means-tested ...

Does Subsidized Care for Toddlers Increase Maternal Labor Supply?

Expanding public or publicly subsidized childcare has been a top social policy priority in many industrialized countries. It is supposed to increase fertility, promote children’s development and enhance mothers’ labor market attachment. In this paper, we analyze the causal effect of one of the largest expansions of subsidized childcare for children up to three years among industrialized countries on ...

New International Evidence on the Effects of Minimum Wages

The gender wage gap and the role of policy: Analyzing patterns over time, over the life cycle and across the wage distribution

The gender wage gap is a persistent and pervasive phenomenon observable in virtually all countries. It has strong implications for a society since it is one main driver of inequality in a country. Therefore, there exists an active public debate and an important academic literature that describes and quantifies the gender wage gap, analyses the reasons for this gap and discusses potential policy...

Strong Correlation between Large Gender Pay Gaps and Non-Linear Pay in Certain Occupations

by Aline Zucco The gender pay gap of 21 percent in Germany is partly due to the fact that men and women work in different occupations. However, considerable pay gaps between men and women can also be observed within occupations, although the gap is not constant across occupations. In particular, there is a substantial gender pay gap in occupations with non-linear earnings, i.e. earnings increase non-linearly ...

Increasing number of women on supervisory boards of major companies in Germany: executive boards still dominated by men

By Elke Holst and Katharina Wrohlich The gender quota for supervisory boards is continuing to show its impact: the proportion of women on the supervisory boards of the 200 highest-performing companies in Germany increased by over two percentage points to 27 percent the past year. In the 100 largest companies, it increased by over three percentage points to 28 percent. However, there are now indications ...

Women on high-level boards of banks and insurance companies: growth coming to a standstill on supervisory boards

By Elke Holst and Katharina Wrohlich The proportion of women on executive boards of the 100 largest banks stagnated at almost nine percent in 2018. In the 60 largest insurance companies, the proportion increased by a good percentage point to almost ten percent. While growth on executive boards has been weakening in past years, it is now slowing down on supervisory boards in the financial sector as ...

Gender Quotas in a European Comparison: Tough Sanctions Most Effective

Women remain significantly underrepresented in the top decision-making bodies in the private sector. Over the past few years, increasingly more European countries have introduced statutory gender quotas to combat this underrepresentation. Other European countries have instead relied on voluntary gender diversity recommendations in the national corporate governance codes. Statutory gender quotas are ...