The aim of this paper is to shed light on the causal mechanisms leading to the gender wage gap, drawing on neoclassical as well as sociological labor market theories. A unique dataset from the 2001/2002 Mannheim University Social Sciences Graduate Survey, which overcomes several limitations of...

Over the course of higher education expansion and growing numbers of graduates, employers are supposed to have increasing difficulties to regard a higher education degree as reliable signal for productivity. As a consequence, they may take into account 'qualitative' differences such as...