Documents van der Velde, Lucas 6 results

"The relation between income inequality and technological progress has many chapters, of which the most recent corresponds to the task content of jobs. Proponents of this theory suggest that falling prices of computational power coupled with the increasing power of computers leads to an increasing substitution of workers with computers and a hollowing of the middle of the income distribution. While empirical analysis on task content of jobs explain inequality between occupations, we test whether the framework can also foster our understanding of wage dispersion within occupations. Using European data, we obtain estimates of wage dispersion and residual wage dispersion for each occupation and relate it to the task content. The results suggest that nonroutine intensive occupations presented greater wage dispersion, even after controlling for a variety of factors."

"Undergoing a large structural shock, labor markets may become less inclusive. We test for this thesis analyzing the behavior of adjusted gender wage gaps in a wide selection of transition countries. We estimate comparable measures of adjusted gender wage gaps for a comprehensive selection of transition countries over a period spanning nearly three decades. We combine these estimates with measures of labor market reallocation in transition economies to uncover the relation between worker flows and the gender wage gap. Results indicate that in periods of reallocation, the adjusted wage gaps increase. Distinguishing between flows according to their contribution to structural transformation reveals the distinctive role paid by separations from the state-owned manufacturing sector, usually leading to greater adjusted gaps. The emerging new sectors in the economy tend to be more inclusive in the short run, associated with a lower adjusted gender gap. In the medium run, the adverse effect of greater separations from the old sector is even more pronounced, while the emergence of the new sector is less relevant."

"Given theoretical premises, gender wage gap adjusted for individual characteristics is likely to vary over age. We adapt DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) semi-parametric technique to disentangle year, cohort and age effects in adjusted gender wage gaps. We rely on a long panel of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel covering the 1984-2015 period. Our results indicate that the gender wage gap increases over the lifetime, for some birth cohorts also in the post-reproductive age."

"Given theoretical premises, gender wage gap adjusted for individual characteristics is likely to vary over age. We extend DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) semi-parametric technique to disentangle year, cohort and age effects in adjusted gender wage gaps. We rely on a long panel of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel covering the 1984-2015 period. Our results indicate that the gender wage gap increases over the lifetime, for some birth cohorts also in the post-reproductive age."

"We investigate the reliability of data from the Wage Indicator (WI), the largest online survey on earnings and working conditions. Comparing WI to nationally representative data sources for 17 countries reveals that participants of WI are not likely to have been representatively drawn from the respective populations. Previous literature has proposed to utilize weights based on inverse propensity scores, but this procedure was shown to leave reweighted WI samples different from the benchmark nationally representative data. We propose a novel procedure, building on covariate balancing propensity score, which achieves complete reweighting of the WI data, making it able to replicate the structure of nationally representative samples on observable characteristics. While rebalancing assures the match between WI and representative benchmark data sources, we show that the wage schedules remain different for a large group of countries. Using the example of a Mincerian wage regression, we find that in more than a third of the cases, our proposed novel reweighting assures that estimates obtained on WI data are not biased relative to nationally representative data. However, in the remaining 60% of the analyzed 95 datasets systematic differences in the estimated coefficients of the Mincerian wage regression between WI and nationally representative data persists even after reweighting. We provide some intuition about the reasons behind these biases. Notably, objective factors such as access to the Internet or richness appear to matter, but self-selection (on unobservable characteristics) among WI participants appears to constitute an important source of bias."

"Women in developed economies have experienced an unparalleled increase in employment rates, to the point that the gap with respect to men was cut in half. This positive trend has often been attributed to changes in the opportunity costs of working (e.g. access to caring facilities) and the opportunity costs of not-working (notably, relative growth in wages in positions more frequently occupied by women, improved educational attainment). Meanwhile, the gender employment gaps were stagnant in transition economies. Admittedly, employment equality among genders was initially much higher in transition countries. We exploit this unique evidence from transition and advanced countries, to analyze the relationship between the institutional environment and the (adjusted) gender employment gaps. We estimate comparable gender employment gaps on nearly 1500 micro databases from over 40 countries. Changes in both types of the opportunity costs exhibited strong correlation with gender employment equality where the gap was larger, i.e. advanced economies. We provide some evidence that these results are not explained away by transition-related phenomena. We argue that the ob-served divergence in time trends reflects a level effect: the lower the gender employment gap, the lower the strength of the relationship between gender employment equality and the opportunity costs of working. An implication from our study is that the existing instruments might be insufficient to further reduce the gender employment gap."