Barbara Petrongolo is an Italian economist, professor, researcher, and writer. [1] She is currently a professor at Queen Mary University of London, Director of the Labour Economics Programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and Co-editor of the Economic Journal which is world renowned for being one of the founding economic journals. [2] Petrongolo previously worked at the London School of Economics, the Paris School of Economics and the Universidad Carlos III (Madrid). [1] Petrongolo's economic research focuses on labour economics.
Petrongolo was born in Pisa, Italy. She began studying economics at the University of Pisa and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, where she acquired her Bachelor of Arts in 1993. She continued her studies in economics through the London School of Economics. Petrongolo obtained her Masters of Science (MSc) in Economics in 1994 and her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Economics in 1998. [3] [4] Her doctoral thesis was titled Job matching and unemployment: Applications to the UK labour market and international comparisons. [5]
In 1997, Petrongolo became employed as an assistant professor in economics at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. Petrongolo later returned to the London School of Economics in 2001 as a lecturer in economics. Between 2009-2012, Petrongolo held the Chaire Ile de France at the Paris School of Economics. She then joined Queen Mary University of London in 2010 as a professor of economics, where she currently teaches. [4]
Barbara Petrongolo and co-author Alan Manning analyzed search strategies of the unemployed to determine if labour markets were local or not. They discuss how local labour market policies must be appropriate for the size of the market it is targeting in order to be effective. They also created their own model to address the fact that the economy cannot be separated into non-overlapping segments, as previous models have done. This allowed them to test how local shocks effect labour demand and labour mobility.
As previous literatures evaluated the economy as non-overlapping segments, it did not lead to the correct conclusion of whether labour markets were local or not. With Petrongolo and Manning's new overlapping model, they were able to characterize the job searching strategies of the unemployed. They found that job seekers are influenced by the cost of the distance to the job as well as their applications expected success rate. Their expected success rate is determined by how many other job seekers in the market are interested in the same job as them. They used the UK labour market to conduct their empirical research. The study found that distance, which is measured using commuting cost or time, discourages workers from applying for jobs. Areas with high application competition also discouraged people from applying for jobs. The study concluded that local location-based labour policies are not effective in decreasing unemployment because labour markets overlap. A more effective alternative is to provide hiring subsidies to the unemployed as it increases their chances of beating the competition. [6]
Petrongolo co-authored this research paper with L. Rachel Ngai. This paper looked at the post World War II era and how the female participation in the U.S. labour market has changed. More specifically, they looked at how structural transformation and marketization has increased female work hours and wages causing an increase in the role of services as well as an increase in female workforce participation.
The study found that the increase in female labour force participation was closely related to structural transformation and marketization and that the fall in male work has partially contributed to the rise in female work. Historically, men have had a comparative advantage in good-producing sectors such as manufacturing, construction, and utilities because men are better endowed with "brawn" skills. This was accompanied with women having a comparative advantage in the services sector because it required "brain" skills, not "brawn" skills. With a structural transformation causing the services sector to broaden, women were able to get more work hours. Secondly, women generally specialized in home production. It was suggested in the paper that home production activities and market services were close substitutes. Therefore as the service market expanded, women would shift out of home production and into the services sector. Petrongolo and Ngai found that marketization attracts women into the workforce while structural transformations creates the job openings that women need. These effects are able to partially explain the decrease in the gender wage gap and the increase in female workforce participation. [7]
Petrongolo and Claudia Olivetti co-authored this paper together. The paper aimed to analyze the effects that family policies have on female workforce participation. The researchers studied the consequences that past policies have had on female workforce participation using tools such as parental leave and other forms of family aid, beginning from the end of the 19th century.
Petrongolo and Olivetti found that within the last century, labour markets have been changing in high-income nations. There has been an increase of females in the workforce which has led to a decrease in the gender wage gap. Petrongolo and Olivetti looked at events such as industrialization and demographic transitions and how they impacted women's workforce participation. Petrongolo and Olivetti found that by the beginning of the 21st century, most high-income nations have implemented some sort of parental leave and family benefit policies in hopes of increasing fertility and child development. They concluded that the most effective family policies to increase female workforce participation and decrease the gender wage gap, are policies that increase early childhood spending. Such policies focus on increasing spending of early education and childcare. [8]
Unemployment, according to the OECD, is people above a specified age not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the reference period.
In economics, a discouraged worker is a person of legal employment age who is not actively seeking employment or who has not found employment after long-term unemployment, but who would prefer to be working. This is usually because an individual has given up looking, hence the term "discouraged".
Parental leave, or family leave, is an employee benefit available in almost all countries. The term "parental leave" may include maternity, paternity, and adoption leave; or may be used distinctively from "maternity leave" and "paternity leave" to describe separate family leave available to either parent to care for small children. In some countries and jurisdictions, "family leave" also includes leave provided to care for ill family members. Often, the minimum benefits and eligibility requirements are stipulated by law.
In macroeconomics, the labor force is the sum of those either working or looking for work :
A Beveridge curve, or UV curve, is a graphical representation of the relationship between unemployment and the job vacancy rate, the number of unfilled jobs expressed as a proportion of the labour force. It typically has vacancies on the vertical axis and unemployment on the horizontal. The curve, named after William Beveridge, is hyperbolic-shaped and slopes downward, as a higher rate of unemployment normally occurs with a lower rate of vacancies. If it moves outward over time, a given level of vacancies would be associated with higher and higher levels of unemployment, which would imply decreasing efficiency in the labour market. Inefficient labour markets are caused by mismatches between available jobs and the unemployed and an immobile labour force.
Workfare is a governmental plan under which welfare recipients are required to accept public-service jobs or to participate in job training. Many countries around the world have adopted workfare to reduce poverty among able-bodied adults; however, their approaches to execution vary. The United States and United Kingdom are two countries utilizing workfare, albeit with different backgrounds.
Employment discrimination is a form of illegal discrimination in the workplace based on legally protected characteristics. In the U.S., federal anti-discrimination law prohibits discrimination by employers against employees based on age, race, gender, sex, religion, national origin, and physical or mental disability. State and local laws often protect additional characteristics such as marital status, veteran status and caregiver/familial status. Earnings differentials or occupational differentiation—where differences in pay come from differences in qualifications or responsibilities—should not be confused with employment discrimination. Discrimination can be intended and involve disparate treatment of a group or be unintended, yet create disparate impact for a group.
A double burden is the workload of people who work to earn money, but who are also responsible for significant amounts of unpaid domestic labor. This phenomenon is also known as the Second Shift as in Arlie Hochschild's book of the same name. In couples where both partners have paid jobs, women often spend significantly more time than men on household chores and caring work, such as childrearing or caring for sick family members. This outcome is determined in large part by traditional gender roles that have been accepted by society over time. Labor market constraints also play a role in determining who does the bulk of unpaid work.
Gender pay gap in Australia looks at the persistence of a gender pay gap in Australia. In Australia, the principle of "equal pay for equal work" was introduced in 1969. Anti-discrimination on the basis of sex was legislated in 1984.
The feminization of the workplace is the feminization, or the shift in gender roles and sex roles and the incorporation of women into a group or a profession once dominated by men, as it relates to the workplace. It is a set of social theories seeking to explain occupational gender-related discrepancies.
Gender and development is an interdisciplinary field of research and applied study that implements a feminist approach to understanding and addressing the disparate impact that economic development and globalization have on people based upon their location, gender, class background, and other socio-political identities. A strictly economic approach to development views a country's development in quantitative terms such as job creation, inflation control, and high employment – all of which aim to improve the ‘economic wellbeing’ of a country and the subsequent quality of life for its people. In terms of economic development, quality of life is defined as access to necessary rights and resources including but not limited to quality education, medical facilities, affordable housing, clean environments, and low crime rate. Gender and development considers many of these same factors; however, gender and development emphasizes efforts towards understanding how multifaceted these issues are in the entangled context of culture, government, and globalization. Accounting for this need, gender and development implements ethnographic research, research that studies a specific culture or group of people by physically immersing the researcher into the environment and daily routine of those being studied, in order to comprehensively understand how development policy and practices affect the everyday life of targeted groups or areas.
In Russia the wage gap exists and statistical analysis shows that most of it cannot be explained by lower qualifications of women compared to men. On the other hand, occupational segregation by gender and labor market discrimination seem to account for a large share of it.
The social and economic changes in Thailand in the past decades have important implications for the quality and quantity of labor. The economic and non-economic roles of women in Thailand can be traced back several hundred years in Thai history, when there were traditional discriminatory attitudes towards women in the culture of Thailand. The transformation of Thailand's social and economic structure since the 1960s led to the gender disparities in Thai society. Recently, the position of Thai women in the labor market has improved a lot in comparison to the past as a result of modernization. In 2011, Thailand ranked 69th out of 143 countries in the Gender Inequality Index. In labor economics, gender inequality is widely discussed in terms of concepts of sex segregation and employment discrimination. Thai government and non-governmental organizations have put forth many policies and programs to address gender inequalities in the last few decades.
Female participation and advancement in majority Muslim countries, or nations in which more than 50% of the population identifies as an adherent of the Islamic faith, have traditionally been areas of controversy. Several Western nations, such as the United States and Western Europe, have criticised majority Muslim nations for the lack of involvement and opportunity for women in the private sector.
Unemployment rates in Spain vary across different regions of the country, but they tend to be higher when compared to other Western European countries.
The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are working. Women are generally found to be paid less than men. There are two distinct numbers regarding the pay gap: non-adjusted versus adjusted pay gap. The latter typically takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience. In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary.
Gender inequality in Mexico refers to disparate freedoms in health, education, and economic and political abilities between men and women in Mexico. It has been diminishing throughout history, but continues to persist in many forms including the disparity in women's political representation and participation, the gender pay gap, and high rates of domestic violence and femicide. As of 2022, the World Economic Forum ranks Mexico 31st in terms of gender equality out of 146 countries. Structural gender inequality is relatively homogeneous between the Mexican states as there are very few regional differences in the inequalities present.
Gender pay gap in India refers to the difference in earnings between women and men in the paid employment and the labor market. For the year 2013, the gender pay gap in India was estimated to be 24.81%. Further, while analyzing the level of female participation in the economy, this report slots India as one of the bottom 10 countries on its list. Thus, in addition to unequal pay, there is also unequal representation, because while women constitute almost half the Indian population, their representation in the work force amounts to only about one-fourth of the total.
Jill Rubery is a Professor of Comparative Employment Systems at Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on comparative analyses of employment systems with a specialisation in gender and labour market structure. She was made a fellow of the British Academy in 2006.
Claudia Olivetti is an Italian economist specializing in the fields of labor economics and the economics of gender and family. She is the George J. Records 1956 Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. and a Research Associate and Co-Director of the "Gender in the Economy" study group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She was previously a professor of economics at Boston College and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow.