We use a first-hand linked employer-employee dataset representing the formal sector of Bangladesh to explain gender wage gaps by the inclusion of measures of cognitive skills and personality traits. Our results show that while cognitive skills are important in determining mean wages, personality...

We use a recent first-hand linked employer-employee survey covering the formal sector of Bangladesh to explain gender wage gaps by the inclusion of measures of cognitive attainment and personality traits. Our results show that cognitive skills have greater explanatory power than personality...

This paper uses a novel matched employer-employee data set representing the formal sector in Bangladesh to provide descriptive evidence of both the relative importance of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in this part of the labor market and the interplay between skills and hiring channels in...

In this paper we show that rent sharing plays a role in explaining the glass ceiling effect. We make use of a unique employer-employee panel database for Italy from 1996 to 2003, which allows controlling for observed individual and firm heterogeneity and for collective bargaining. Moreover, by...

Using a two-stage decomposition technique, this paper analyzes the role of occupational segregation in explaining the probability of women vis-à-vis men of finding high-paying jobs over the life-cycle. Jobs are classified as highly-remunerated if their compensation exceeds a threshold, which is...

Using first-hand data from the 2009 Employment and Informal Sector Survey (EESIC) in the two largest cities of the Republic of Congo, Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire, we analyse the impact of education on labour market outcomes, and identify the segments where education pays off the most....

Family and kinship networks are important in helping people get jobs and start companies, as statistics for developing countries show. Promising new research has begun to assess the positive and negative effects of these family and kinship ties on entrepreneurial success. To what extent, and...

This paper studies a fair trade program in which consumers provide a wage subsidy (bonus) to piece-rate tomato pickers. The total subsidy - determined by sales to participating buyers - is divided among workers based on their relative output: a worker who produces more gets a larger share of the...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...