The Glass Ceiling in Europe: Why Are Women Doing Badly in the Labour Market?

Average gender pay gaps have absorbed the interest of economists for many years. More recently studies have begun to explore the degree to which observed gender wage gaps might differ across the wages distribution. The stylised facts from these studies, summarised in the first part of the paper, are that the gender pay gap in Europe is typically increasing across the wages distribution. This finding - more pronounced in the private than the public sector - has been interpreted as a glass ceiling effect. The existence of this glass ceiling suggests that the average gender pay gap in Europe is mainly due to the gender gap towards the top of the wages distribution. What explains these stylised facts? We briefly outline some relevant hypotheses in the second part of the paper. A fundamental challenge for labour economists is to identify the extent to which these stylised facts are due to policies and institutions, discrimination, to other unobservable factors, or to fundamental differences between men and women. Finally, we briefly summarise the policy initiatives that might be introduced to deal with gender wage gaps.gender, discrimination, glass ceilings, sticky floors, quantile regression decompositions

Gender and Competition

In almost all European Union countries, the gender wage gap is increasing across the wages distribution. In this lecture I briefly survey some recent studies aiming to explain why apparently identical women and men receive such different returns and focus especially on those incorporating psychological factors as an explanation of the gender gap. Research areas with high potential returns to further analysis are identified. Several examples from my own recent experimental work with Patrick Nolen are also presented. These try to distinguish between the role of nature and nurture in affecting behavioural differences between men and women that might lead to gender wage gaps.glass ceiling, experimental economics, personality differences, behaviour

Estimating the Wage Elasticity of Labour Supply to a Firm: Is there Monopsony Down-under?

In this paper we estimate the elasticity of the labour supply to a firm, using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Estimation of this elasticity is of particular interest because of its relevance to the debate about the competitiveness of labour markets. The essence of monopsonistically competitive labour markets is that labour supply to a firm is imperfectly elastic with respect to the wage rate. The intuition is that, where workers have heterogeneous preferences or face mobility costs, firms can offer lower wages without immediately losing their workforce. This is in contrast to the perfectly competitive extreme, in which the elasticity is infinite. Therefore a simple test of whether labour markets are perfectly or imperfectly competitive involves estimating the elasticity of the labour supply to a firm. We do this, following the modelling strategy of Manning (2003), and find that the Australian wage elasticity of labour supply to a firm is around 0.71, only slightly smaller than the figure of 0.75 reported for the UK. These estimates are so far from the perfectly competitive assumption of an infinite elasticity that it would be difficult to make a case that labour markets are perfectly competitive.monopsony, imperfect competition, separation, labour supply elasticity

Choosing To Compete: How Different Are Girls and Boys?

Using a controlled experiment, we examine the role of nurture in explaining the stylized fact that women shy away from competition. Our subjects (students just under 15 years of age) attend publicly-funded single-sex and coeducational schools. We found robust differences between the competitive choices of girls from single-sex and coed schools. Moreover, girls from single-sex schools behave more like boys even when randomly assigned to mixed-sex experimental groups. Thus it is untrue that the average female avoids competitive behaviour more than the average male. This suggests that observed gender differences might reflect social learning rather than inherent gender traits.

A Microfoundation for Increasing Returns in Human Capital Accumulation and the Under-Participation Trap

This paper considers educational investment, wages and hours of market work in an imperfectly competitive labour market with heterogeneous workers and home production. It investigates the degree to which there might be both underemployment in the labour market and underinvestment in education. A central insight is that the ex-post participation decision of workers endogeneously generates increasing marginal returns to education. Although equilibrium implies underinvestment in education, optimal policy is not to subsidise education. Instead it is to subsidise labour market participation which we argue might be efficiently targeted as state provided childcare support.Education, home production, hours of work, imperfect competition.

‘Being Involved in Community Based Research; Lessons from the Objective 1 South Yorkshire Context’

This article reports the findings of a qualitative investigation into community based research within the Objective 1 Programme, South Yorkshire. Based upon semi-structured interviews with participants undertaking community based research and then developing action plans based upon the research findings, the study highlights the issues associated with involvement in such research from participant’s perspectives. Beginning with an examination of involvement in research and then moving on to discuss the wider issues of involvement in regeneration and partnerships, the article argues that despite the increased policy focus on bottom-up approaches, involvement is complex and conceptualised in a number of different ways and therefore requires further investigation

Estimating the Wage Elasticity of Labour Supply to a Firm: What Evidence Is There for Monopsony?

In this paper we estimate the elasticity of the labour supply to a firm, using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Estimation of this elasticity is of particular interest not only in its own right but also because of its relevance to the debate about the competitiveness of labour markets. The essence of monopsonistically competitive labour markets is that labour supply to a firm is imperfectly elastic with respect to the wage rate. The intuition is that, where workers have heterogeneous preferences or face mobility costs, firms can offer lower wages without immediately losing their workforce. This is in contrast to the perfectly competitive extreme, in which the elasticity is infinite. Therefore a simple test of whether labour markets are perfectly or imperfectly competitive involves estimating the elasticity of the labour supply to a firm. We find that the Australian wage elasticity of labour supply to a firm is around 0.71, only slightly smaller than the figure of 0.75 reported by Manning (2003) for the UK. These estimates are so far from the perfectly competitive assumption of an infinite elasticity that it would be difficult to make a case that labour markets are perfectly competitive.monopsony, imperfect competition, separation, labour supply elasticity

Locally Directed Policy and the Fostering of Social Capital Within Regeneration: The Case of Objective 1 South Yorkshire

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study on the impact of community-based research within the South Yorkshire Objective 1 Programme. Based upon semi-structured interviews with participants who conducted community-based research, the study highlights the social capital impacts arising from the use of such research within development practice particularly in terms of the formation of networks and the development of trust. Although community-based research can enhance social capital, the study demonstrates that this is a complex process and as such is not an easy tool to harness and use within the policy-making process