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In this article, the authors study the gender pay-gap (GPG) among graduates in Italy (2011 cohort) who were employed four years after graduation. The authors focus on individuals who are new entering in the labour market or who match a low level of experience with a high level of education.

Aimed at estimating the amount of the differential between male and female average wages, the authors have applied the Oaxaca–Blinder (O–B) decomposition. The results identify the presence of a GPG at the very beginning of graduates’ careers given that, shortly after graduation, women receive lower salaries than men, even after controlling for several characteristics (individual, academic, job and local labour market). The authors completed the analysis with the reweighted O–B decomposition using the recentered influence function (RIF) and the Juhn, Murphy and Pierce and Machado and Mata decomposition approaches.

The results show that the GPG is already present at the very beginning of graduates’ careers, and it increases when correcting for women’s lower level of participation in the labour market. The authors also identified sticky floor and the glass ceiling effects due to the existence of a relevant high GPG both at the bottom and the top of the graduates’ wage distribution.

By focussing attention particularly on graduates, this paper adds to the existing literature a deeper understanding not only of individuals who have recently entered the labour market, but also those who are highly skilled but have little on-the-job experience. In fact, the authors are looking at a particular sample (graduates who are all transitioning from university to work during the same period) with small heterogeneity which allows the authors to compare very similar young men and women graduates and gain a deeper understanding of GPGs in early careers while controlling for confounding and hidden sources of variability.

This paper aims to measure income differences between the obese and the non-obese for Brazil and understand which components explain these differences.

A decomposition method based on recentered influence functions, proposed by Firpo et al. (2007) is used, and the procedure is applied to individuals' income distribution quantiles.

The results confirm the existence of a wage gap between obese and non-obese men and women. In the case of men, the difference was favorable to the obese in all quantiles and in the case of women, favorable to the non-obese. The biggest differences were observed at the top of the distribution. This difference is mostly explained by observable characteristics that cause the wage gap between groups. The wage structure effect, which may have elements associated with discrimination in its composition, was not relevant in most quantiles.

Unobserved factors can impact the results, but our methodology tries to minimize such impact.

The authors can only observe a point in time and with that they do not know how long the individual has been obese.

The methodology adopted in the work is recent; moreover, studies on the effects of obesity on the labor market are still recent in Brazilian research.

The authors illustrate that there are significant differences in the wage performance across companies in relation to the digital content of their production and training activities.

Using company-level data from three waves of the Continuing Vocational Training Survey (2005, 2010 and 2015), this paper provides an overview on European firms implementing training and the magnitude of their training effort.

The authors conduct a regression analysis documenting that a wage premium of 9% is associated with companies undertaking training and that an additional 8% is paid by firms arranging training for IT skills-intensive workers. The latter effect is pervasive across sectors and is not strictly related to industry exposure to the digital transformation.

The authors assess the wage effect of training, in relation to the digital content of firm production or job tasks, using a large set of European companies (112,000), from countries with different degree of specialisation and institutional setting. The analysis covers a significant period of time of the last wave of digitalisation (2005, 2010, 2015).

To run a job guarantee public policy scheme, it is important to know the aspiration level or the reference point of labor, and accordingly, the labor hour and the wage sequence are to be prepared. The existing job guarantee schemes consider the same wage rates for all types of jobs. As a result, it is to identify the reference point. The present work aims to propose a job guarantee scheme where different types of jobs have different wage rates. The paper explains the choice problem between labor and leisure at different wage rates and proposes complete computational tools to be incorporated into the job guarantee schemes. The paper also gives a mechanism to prepare the list of jobs and corresponding wage rates by maintaining a balance between labor and leisure, where productive activities measure labor hours and labor welfare measures leisure hours. Lastly, the paper provides the analytical tools to interpret the ex-post data of the job guarantee public policy schemes.

The paper has been written based on the Coordination Game and its Welfare Implications in the job guarantee public policy schemes.

The present paper gives an initial work to measure the choice between labor and leisure for the different wage rates practically. This will help in getting the equilibrium strategies, namely, the combination of the labor hour and the wage rate between the policymaker and the labor. This method will help to implement the job guarantee schemes. For example, to run successfully the Basic Income policy, the basic income calculation should give due care; otherwise, there will be a downward trend in the basic income and the welfare of labor will be reduced, because the labor would have to supply excess labor to meet the target income.

This paper derives theories and explains how the equilibrium in this coordination game can be achieved. The paper explains how the policy of the job guarantee schemes can be practiced practically. In the MGNREGA scheme, the public institution declares different categories of jobs with different wage rates. The categories have been classified with respect to the hours required to complete the job. Therefore, the public institution declares different lists or a sequence of pairs of labor hours and wage rates. Moreover, the list is stochastic, because the list can be changed by the inclusion of an offer from the market as well. The labor has to select from the list. The challenge on the part of the public institution is to prepare the list in such a way so that the inclusion of the market offers will not distort the equilibrium of the coordination game. An important method has been proposed here to analyze the ex-post data of job offers so that the preparation of the future sequence of the job offers can be prepared with due care. One objective of the policymaker here is to make a list of job offers in such a way so that the labor supply will be converging to a point and that will not deviate if the wage rate increases further. This objective will make a balance of the distribution of funds between the existing registered labor and the new entrants into the job guarantee schemes.

The purpose of this study is to estimate revealed comparative advantage and normalized revealed comparative advantage (NRCA) indices of India’s computer and information services (CIS) export competitiveness with regard to information technology (IT) competing developing nations, such as China, Philippines, Malaysia and Brazil.

Using annual data of total exports for CIS, transportation (TNS), travel (TVL) and insurance (INS) services under service categories of the balance of payment, the present study estimates the pattern of comparative advantage (CA) in India’s CIS exports with respect to IT competing developing nations such as China, Philippines, Malaysia and Brazil from 2000 to 2018. The choice of the study period is determined by the availability of consistent data on IT service exports of these nations. The study also estimates the export position of CIS export in comparison to India’s traditionally strong commercial services export of TNS, TVL and INS during the study period.

Both the indices showed that India had a strong CA in CIS compared to the selected nations, indicating India’s relative export performance to be stronger than that of China, Malaysia, Philippines and Brazil. The cross-service index showed that India’s relative specialization level in CIS with respect to the world’s average specialization level was stronger than its relative specialization level in TNS, TVL and INS services. Furthermore, The NRCA cross-nation index showed that India’s NRCA index score has been declining since 2010 with respect to these nations, which implied a decline in the competitiveness of CIS. On the other hand, NRCA has increased in the case of Philippines, Malaysia and Brazil for most of the period post-2010.

IT is a dynamic area of economic activity, and when the pace of change is so rapid, the relevance of individual factors can change over time. The study period is also limited to the available data.

The paper has implications for attaining sustainability in IT export growth. It is suggested that policies are directed at enhancing the overall performance of IT sector.

The novelty of the present study lies in the estimation of India’s competitiveness in IT exports in relation to the group of reference countries. With its policy recommendations, this research is helping to shape the sustainability of the IT sector.

Using the Canadian Census of 2016, the present study examines the Black and White gap in compensating differentials for their commute to work.

The data are from the Canadian Census of 2016. The standard Mincerian wage regression, augmented by commute-related variables and their confounders, is estimated by OLS. The estimations use sample weights and heteroscedasticity robust standard errors.

In the standard Mincerian wage regressions, Black men are found to earn non-negligibly less than White men. No such gap is found among women. When the Mincerian wage equation is augmented by commute duration and its confounders, commute duration is revealed to positively predict wages of White men and negatively associate with wages of Black men. At the same time, in the specifications including commute duration and its confounders, the coefficient for the dummy variable identifying Black men is positive with a non-negligible size. The latter pattern indicates wage discrepancies among Black men by their commute duration. Again, no difference is found between Black and White women in these estimations.

The main caveat is that due to data limitations, causal estimates could not be produced.

For the Canadian working men, the uncovered patterns indicate both between and within race gaps in the impact of commuting on wages. Particularly, Black men seem to commute longer towards relatively lower paying jobs, while the opposite holds for their White counterparts. However, Black men who reside close to their work earn substantially more than both otherwise identical White men and Black men who live far away from their jobs. The implications for research and policy are discussed.

This is the first paper focused on commute compensating differentials by race using Canadian data.

This study aims to investigate the effect of smoking on the income of workers in the Brazilian labor market.

Using data from the 2019 National Health Survey (PNS), we initially address the sample selection bias concerning labor market participation by using the Heckman (1979) method. Subsequently, the decomposition of income between smokers and nonsmokers is analyzed, both on average and across the earnings distribution by employing the procedure of Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009) - FFL decomposition. Ñopo (2008) technique is also used to obtain more robust estimates.

Overall, the findings indicate an income penalty for smokers in the Brazilian labor market across both the average and all quantiles of the income distribution. Notably, the most significant differentials and income penalties against smokers are observed in the lower quantiles of the distribution. Conversely, in the higher quantiles, there is a tendency toward a smaller magnitude of this gap, with limited evidence of an income penalty associated with this habit.

This study presents an important limitation, which refers to a restriction of the PNS (2019), which does not provide information about some subjective factors that also tend to influence the levels of labor income, such as the level of effort and specific ability of each worker, whether smokers or not, something that could also, in some way, be related to some latent individual predisposition that would influence the choice of smoking.

The relevance of the present study is clear in identifying the heterogeneity of the income gap in favor of nonsmokers, as in the lower quantiles there was a greater magnitude of differentials against smokers and a greater incidence of unexplained penalties in the income of these workers, while in the higher quantiles, there was low magnitude of the differentials and little evidence that there is a penalty in earnings since the worker is a smoker.

This paper explores the wages of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and “other race” women and men once differences in basic characteristics among these 12 groups are accounted for. The authors aim to extend comparisons beyond those of women and men of the same race or the various races within a given gender.

To undertake the conditional analysis, first, the authors propose a simple re-weighing scheme that allows to build a counterfactual economy in which workers' attributes for all gender–race/ethnicity groups are the same. Second, the authors use a well-known re-weighting scheme that involves logit estimations.

Only Hispanic men, Native American men and Asian women have conditional wages around average. Black men and, especially, White, Black, Hispanic, Native American and “other race” women have conditional wages clearly below average, whereas those of Asian and White men are well above average. The wage differential between a privileged and a deprived group is disentangled into the premium of the former and the penalty of the latter, which brings a new perspective to what has been done in the literature based on pairwise comparisons. In this intersectional framework, the authors document that gender penalizes more than race.

This paper examines intergroup earnings differentials using a methodology that allows to examine 12 gender–race/ethnicity groups jointly, which is this work's distinctive feature. The authors' intersectional framework allows to picture the effect of gender and race/ethnicity more broadly than what the literature has shown thus far.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between gender occupational intensity and wages in the Northern Triangle of Central America using national surveys carried out in 2014.

A harmonized occupational classification at the -digit level is built with the objective of analyzing the occupational distribution across countries. Then, quantile regressions (QRs) are estimated to explore in detail which factors are affecting the wages of both females and males; in particular, this paper pays special attention to female occupational intensity (the share of females within each occupation).

The comparative analysis suggests that women are overrepresented in certain occupations, and they are much more likely to be working in part-time jobs than men in all countries. Furthermore, findings reveal that working in female-dominated occupations has a negative effect on wages along the distribution across countries. However, the effect of this variable is higher at the lower quantile of the distribution for women, especially in El Salvador and Honduras.

This paper first proposes a new typology of occupations, which allows a consistent and comparable analysis of the occupational structure. The results then provide a picture to address gender occupational intensity and its links with wages. Further, the characteristics of the labor market and differences in trends across these countries suggest that this topic requires challenging research for the region.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-03-2021-0165

The authors' work aims to identify the employer-specific drivers of the college (or university) wage gap, which has been identified as one of the major determinants of the dynamics of overall wage and income inequality in the past decades. The authors focus on three employer-level features that can be associated with asymmetries in the employment relation orientation adopted for college and non-college-educated employees: (1) size, (2) the share of standard employment and (3) the pervasiveness of incentive pay schemes.

The authors' establishment-level analysis (data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), 2005–2018) focusses on Japan, an economy characterised by many unique economic and institutional features relevant to the aims of the authors' analysis. The authors use an adjusted measure of firm-specific college wage premium, which is not biased by confounding individual and establishment-level factors and reflects unobservable characteristics of employees that determine the payment of a premium. The authors' empirical methods account for the complexity of the relationships they investigate, and the authors test their baseline outcomes with econometric approaches (propensity score methods) able to address crucial identification issues related to endogeneity and reverse causality.

The authors' findings indicate that larger establishment size, a larger share of regular workers and more pervasive implementation of IPSs for college workers tend to increase the college wage gap once all observable workers, job and establishment characteristics are controlled for. This evidence corroborates the authors' hypotheses that a larger establishment size, a higher share of regular workers and a more developed set-up of performance pay schemes for college workers are associated with a better capacity of employers to attract and keep highly educated employees with unobservable characteristics that justify a wage premium above average market levels. The authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

The authors' contribution to the existing knowledge is threefold. First, the authors combine the economics and management/organisation literature to develop new insights that underpin the authors' testable empirical hypotheses. This enables the authors to shed light on employer-level drivers of wage differentials (size, workforce composition, implementation of performance-pay schemes) related to many structural, institutional and strategic dimensions. The second contribution lies in the authors' measure of the “adjusted” college wage gap, which is calculated on the component of individual wages that differs between observationally identical workers in the same establishment. As such, the metric captures unobservable workers' characteristics that can generate a wage premium/penalty. Third, the authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.