This paper criticizes the Alesina and Ichino (2007) proposal of taxing men more than women. First, the proposal is outright sex discrimination. Second, it cannot be Pareto-improving. Third, its virtues in terms of efficiency are better obtained by gender-neutral voluntary schemes for taxing...

This paper presents a wage series for unskilled English women workers from 1260 to 1850 and compares it with existing evidence for men. Our series cast light on long run trends in women’s agency and wellbeing, revealing an intractable, indeed widening gap between women and men’s remuneration...

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...

Using the HILDA survey, this paper analyses Australian gender wage gaps in both public and private sectors across the wage distribution. Quantile Regression (QR) techniques are used to control for various characteristics at different points of the wage distributions. Counterfactual decomposition...

One of the most striking changes in labour market policy of the past 50 years has come in the form of legislation to limit discrimination in the workplace based on race, gender, disability and age. If such measures are to be effective in ending discrimination, they need to be enforced. The...

In this paper, we analyse an equilibrium search model with three sources for wage and unemployment differentials among workers with the same (observed) human capital but different appearance (race): unobserved productivity (skill), search intensities and discrimination (Becker 1957) due to an...

Using harmonised data from the European Union Household Panel, we analyse gender pay gaps by sector across the wages distribution for eleven countries. We find that the mean gender pay gap in the raw data typically hides large variations in the gap across the wages distribution. We use quantile...

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being...

This paper documents the existence of striking regional differences in the reported behaviour of employees working within the same firm, but in different Italian regions. In particular, the frequency of recorded and punished misconduct episodes is significantly higher among employees working in...

In most Western countries illness-related absenteeism is higher among female workers than among male workers. Using the personnel dataset of a large Italian bank, we show that the probability of an absence due to illness increases for females, relative to males, approximately 28 days after a...