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The purpose of this paper is to better understand the possible reasons behind gender pay disparities, focussing on the unique features of male and female human capital and their wage returns. Despite increasing convergence of male and female human capital attainments, substantial differences remain. Extraction of human capital components non-overlapping across genders provides more profound explanation of the unexplained wage gap of men and women.

Starting with the non-parametric matching-based decomposition technique, the authors extend the pay gap estimation framework and focus on males and females having no counterpart in a set of characteristics within the opposite gender. The authors identify gender-unique human capital in terms of differences in distribution of individual characteristics across men and women and gender-specific combination of human capital characteristics. Wage returns to gender-specific profiles are evaluated applying wage regression on both full distribution of earnings and wage quantiles. The research relies on the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) database for Estonia, which incorporates both formal education and cognitive skill records.

The study identifies sets of characteristics and competencies exclusive for both genders, proving that male and female profiles cannot be directly compared. The results suggest that men possess high individual and combined abilities in numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environment, not always reached by females. This potentiates men’s higher earnings in spite of their generally lower formal educational attainments. Wage gap analysis over the full distribution of earnings shows even larger “glass ceiling” effect for females, possessing woman-specific human capital.

The authors raise a research from a novel perspective towards a role of human capital in gender wage inequality. Instead of usual reference to observable gaps in male and female characteristics, the authors identify the gender-specific human capital profiles, to a large extent non-reached by the opposite gender. Analysed associations between gender-specific characteristics and earnings provide an insight to possible effects of gender-unique human capital on a male-female wage disparity.

The purpose of this paper is to address the role of cognitive skills and extent of skill use at work in explaining the immigrant–native wage gap in Europe. The study targets immigrant–native disparities in literacy and numeracy cognitive skills, as important, yet not exhaustive factor behind immigrants’ wage penalty.

The research relies on the Program of International Assessment of Adult Competencies data for 15 European countries. The empirical analysis employs multivariate regression analysis and incorporates the full set of plausible values for each skill domain, to correctly measure cognitive skills. To estimate standard errors, the authors employ Jackknife replication methodology with 80 replication weights and final population weight.

The authors document that, on average, immigrants achieve substantially worse scores in literacy and numeracy test domains. Only highly educated immigrants tend to improve their skills over time in host countries. The results of wage gap analysis indicate that having cognitive skills, demographic profile and occupation category comparable to natives does not yield comparable wage rate. The remaining wage gap results from the systematic differences in skills application at work, as immigrants use their skills to lower extent, relative to natives.

The research employs a novel measure of productive human capital, which accounts for cognitive skills in literacy and numeracy domains, and frequencies of skill use at work. It allows to more precisely evaluate the immigrant–native disparity in human capital application and its reflection on the wage rate.

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of variability of empirical results of several financial contagion studies, taking into account the role of financial markets, data sets and the applied definitions and methods that may explain the variability of empirical evidence.

The authors used qualitative analysis of published research materials about previous financial crises and analyzed the variability of empirical results of around 75 studies of financial contagion, taking into account the particularities of financial markets, data sets and tests methods.

The results of the analysis show that empirical studies provide heterogeneous results depending on applied definitions and methods, as well as chosen crises, destination countries and financial indices. Summing up all the relevant empirical findings the results supporting the contagion hypothesis are in clear dominance, but taking into account differences in definitions and testing methodologies the research did not reveal clear results as to which evidence dominates or should dominate.

The authors conclude that solely qualitative analysis of published research materials about previous financial crises does not give sufficient information to elaborate proper management measures to prevent serious consequences of financial crises. The authors propose that it is possible to obtain a more adequate picture of financial contagion by using a meta‐analysis, which the authors are planning to do in future studies.

The paper provides information about some reasons that explain the variability of the results that are presented in the empirical studies about financial contagion. This information can be used for elaborating policy proposals and regulations that can help alleviate possible negative consequences of financial contagion. The paper shows the way for future articles summarising financial contagion.

The study sums up previous findings on the field of financial contagion and shows the insufficiency of the traditional literature review to accomplish that task.