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Labour economics, or labor economics, seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the markets for wage labour. Labour is a commodity that is supplied by labourers, usually in exchange for a wage paid by demanding firms. Because these labourers exist as parts of a social, institutional, or political system, labour economics must also account for social, cultural and political variables.
A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration that employers can legally pay their employees—the price floor below which employees may not sell their labor. Most countries had introduced minimum wage legislation by the end of the 20th century. Because minimum wages increase the cost of labor, companies often try to avoid minimum wage laws by using gig workers, by moving labor to locations with lower or nonexistent minimum wages, or by automating job functions.
David Edward Card is a Canadian-American labour economist and professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", with Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens jointly awarded the other half.
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.
The gender pay gap in the United States is the difference between the earnings of male and female workers in the country. There are two distinct numbers regarding the pay gap: non-adjusted versus adjusted pay gap. The adjusted pay gap takes into account differences in hours worked, occupations chosen, education and job experience, whereas the non-adjusted pay gap is simply based on the average earnings of all men and women in the United States. The non-adjusted average female annual salary is around 80% of the average male salary, compared to 95% for the adjusted average salary.
Wage differential is a term used in labour economics to analyze the relation between the wage rate and the unpleasantness, risk, or other undesirable attributes of a particular job. A compensating differential, which is also called a compensating wage differential or an equalizing difference, is defined as the additional amount of income that a given worker must be offered in order to motivate them to accept a given undesirable job, relative to other jobs that worker could perform. One can also speak of the compensating differential for an especially desirable job, or one that provides special benefits, but in this case the differential would be negative: that is, a given worker would be willing to accept a lower wage for an especially desirable job, relative to other jobs.
In economics, a monopsony is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. The microeconomic theory of monopsony assumes a single entity to have market power over all sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service. This is a similar power to that of a monopolist, which can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, where multiple buyers have only one seller of a good or service available to purchase from.
The Kitagawa–Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition is a statistical method that explains the difference in the means of a dependent variable between two groups by decomposing the gap into that part that is due to differences in the mean values of the independent variable within the groups, on the one hand, and group differences in the effects of the independent variable, on the other hand. The method was introduced by sociologist and demographer Evelyn M. Kitagawa in 1955. Ronald Oaxaca introduced this method in economics in his doctoral thesis at Princeton University and eventually published in 1973. The decomposition technique also carries the name of Alan Blinder who proposed a similar approach in the same year. Oaxaca's original research question was the wage differential between two different groups of workers, but the method has since been applied to numerous other topics.
Statistical discrimination is a theorized behavior in which racial or gender inequality results when economic agents have imperfect information about individuals they interact with. According to this theory, inequality may exist and persist between demographic groups even when economic agents are rational and non-prejudiced. It stands in contrast with taste-based discrimination which uses racism, sexism and the likes to explain different labour market outcomes of groups.
In the United States, despite the efforts of equality proponents, income inequality persists among races and ethnicities. Asian Americans have the highest median income, followed by White Americans, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans. A variety of explanations for these differences have been proposed—such as differing access to education, two parent home family structure, high school dropout rates and experience of discrimination and deep-seated and systemic anti-Black racism—and the topic is highly controversial.
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.
Alan Manning is a British economist and professor of economics at the London School of Economics.
John Maron Abowd is the Associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist of the US Census Bureau, where he serves on leave from his position as the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, professor of information science, and member of the Department of Statistical Science at Cornell University.
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% of the average man's salary, compared to 95% for the adjusted average salary.
Joseph Gerard Altonji is an American labour economist and the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics at Yale University. His fields of interest include macroeconomics and applied econometrics and in particular labour economics, being ranked as one of the foremost labour economists worldwide. In 2018, his contributions to the analysis of labour supply, family economics and discrimination were rewarded with the IZA Prize in Labor Economics.
Thomas Lemieux is a Canadian economist and professor at the University of British Columbia.
Shelly J. Lundberg is an economist and currently holds the positions of Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she serves as Associate Director of the Broom Center for Demography. Lundberg is one of the world's leading population economists.
Nicole M. Fortin is a Professor in the Vancouver School of Economics (VSE) at University of British Columbia, where she obtained her Ph.D. in Economics. Before moving to Vancouver, B.C. in 1999, Fortin taught at Université de Montréal for ten years in her hometown. She was the President of the Canadian Women Economic Network (CWEN) in 2013–2014. Her research focus is placed on three main themes, including the linkage between labour market institutions and wage inequality, issues related to the economic progress of gender equality, as well as contributions to decomposition methods. Notably, Fortin contributed to the ground-breaking research presented in the 2015 World Happiness Report by examining how various factors impact feelings of happiness for individuals, and societal well-being overall, across the globe.
Rhonda Michèle Williams was an American professor, activist and political economist whose work combined economics with multiple other social fields including race and gender analysis, law, politics, public policy and cultural studies. She aimed to show how the examination of the roles of race and gender in economics benefitted from an inclusive approach rather than a separate and fragmented analysis in order to ensure that issues of economic inequality and discrimination were aptly addressed. Williams was also noted as being consistent in aligning her own ethics with economic analysis resulting in a legacy in the political economy of race and gender.
Eleonora Patacchini is an economist specializing in applied economics and applied statistics who grew up in Italy with her mother who was also a professor. She is a professor and associate department chair at Cornell University in the Department of Economics. Her research focuses on the empirical analysis of behavioral models of strategic interactions for decision making. Patacchini is an associate editor at Journal of Urban Economics and Statistical Methods & Applications. She is a columnist at the VOX CEPR Policy Portal where research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists are published frequently. She is also a co-editor of E-journal Economics and associate editor of the Journal of Urban Economics.
References
- ↑ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original on October 6, 2014. Retrieved 2014-10-05.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ↑ Oaxaca, R. (1973). "Male-Female Wage Differentials in Urban Labor Markets". International Economic Review . 14 (3): 693–709. doi:10.2307/2525981. JSTOR 2525981.
