We investigate the importance of employer preferences in explaining Sticky Floors, the pattern that women are, compared to men, less likely to start to climb the job ladder. To this end we perform a randomised field experiment in the Belgian labour market and test whether hiring discrimination...

pt. 1. Historical perspectives -- pt. 2. Theoretical developments -- pt. 3. A fresh look at households -- pt. 4. Labour market debates -- pt. 5. Lessons from the laboratory -- pt. 6. Institutions matter.

According to a classical argument, an employer handicaps herself if she bases hiring decisions on factors unrelated to productivity; therefore, discrimination is undermined by competition. The present paper, in contrast, argues that being discriminatory can be a commitment device that helps an...

Chapter 1: A Rationale for the Study of Intersectional Wage Discrimination -- Chapter 2: Theories of Discrimination and a Review of the Related Literature -- Chapter 3: Our Empirical Strategy: Mincer Earnings Functions and the Blinder-Oaxaca Technique -- Chapter 4: Estimating Wage Discrimination...

We propose a new method which allows for measuring separately taste based discrimination from statistical discrimination in the hiring process. We consider two types of statistical discriminations against women: first, when a recruiter doubts the productivity of the workers; second, when a...