The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. We use occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We...

This paper models gender discrimination in the labor market as originating from bargaining between husbands and wives within the family. The husband-wife household bargains over resource distribution, with each spouse's bargaining power determined by his/her market income. Men are reluctant to...

We present a theoretical explanation of the gender wage gap that turns on the interaction between men and women in households. In equilibria where men are over-represented in full-time work, we show that firms rationally choose to hire women only at strictly lower wages to men. The model...

Since monetary union with West Germany on 1 July 1990, eastern female monthly wages have risen by 10 percentage points relative to male wages, but female employment has fallen 5 percentage points more than male employment. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel to study the years 1990–94, I...

This paper examines the hypothesis that the gender salary gap observed in the academic labour market is predominantly explained by the differing average characteristics of male and female academics and barriers to female promotion. Preliminary analysis reveals that the crowding of women onto the...

This paper models, for the first time, the relationship between gender quotas and the quality of elected public officials. In our economy, females and males can be either high or low-skill. The number of high-skill individuals elected for public office determines the overall quality of...

Differences in gender-based labour market discrimination across countries imply that migration may affect husbands and wives differently. If migrant wives experience a relative improvement in their labour market position, bargaining theory suggests that they should experience comparatively...

Consider a model with two types of jobs. The profitability of promoting a worker to a fast-track job depends not only on his or her observable talent, but also on incontractible effort. We investigate whether self-fulfilling expectations may lead to women meeting tougher promotion standards than...

This paper investigates the effects of firm entry deregulation. We exploit a recent reform that simplified business entry in Portugal as a quasi-natural experiment. We use cross-municipality-year variation in the implementation of the reform for identification. Using matched employer-employee...

In contrast to the United States or the United Kingdom where union status is generally tied to the job, the typical unionized worker in Germany is a member of an industry union and there is no direct institutional link between union membership and the worker's wage. Using micro data from the...