Many studies document that women with children tend to earn lower wages than women without children (a shortfall known as the 'child penalty' or 'family gap'). Despite the existence of several hypotheses about the causes of the child penalty, much about the gap in wages remains unexplained. This study explores the premise that mothers might substitute income for advantageous, non-pecuniary job characteristics. More specifically, the hypothesis to be investigated is that if the labour market rewards working arrangements that involve disamenities, to some extent the child penalty might be a compensating wage differential for the disamenities avoided by mothers. In order to assess the impact of motherhood on the choice between pecuniary and non-pecuniary job features in Germany, data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) is used. The longitudinal nature of the data allows a comparison of working women before and after the birth of their first child. Furthermore, the GSOEP provides detailed information on personal attributes, job characteristics and job satisfaction, which enables the application of the following three steps to test the hypothesis. First, an event study is used to analyse the changes in the characteristics of a woman's job around the birth of her first child. The features of interest are time, workload and flexibility. Second, job characteristics are included by their utility (proxied by job satisfaction) for a mother. Third, following the approach of hedonic wage regressions, these (dis)amenities are included in the wage regression in order to see whether a trade-off exists between pecuniary and non-pecuniary job characteristics. The results suggest that to some degree the child penalty can be interpreted as a compensating wage differential.

The transformation of women's lives over the past century is among the most significant and far-reaching of social and economic phenomena, affecting not only women but also their partners, children, and indeed nearly every person on the planet. In developed and developing countries alike, women are acquiring more education, marrying later, having fewer children, and spending a far greater amount of their adult lives in the labor force. Yet, because women remain the primary caregivers of children, issues such as work-life balance and the glass ceiling have given rise to critical policy discussions in the developed world. In developing countries, many women lack access to reproductive technology and are often relegated to jobs in the informal sector, where pay is variable and job security is weak. Considerable occupational segregation and stubborn gender pay gaps persist around the world. The Oxford Handbook of Women and the Economy is the first comprehensive collection of scholarly essays to address these issues using the powerful framework of economics. Each chapter, written by an acknowledged expert or team of experts, reviews the key trends, surveys the relevant economic theory, and summarizes and critiques the empirical research literature. By providing a clear-eyed view of what we know, what we do not know, and what the critical unanswered questions are, this Handbook provides an invaluable and wide-ranging examination of the many changes that have occurred in women's economic lives.

"Overeducation is one of the most important mechanisms for labor market adjustment when there is an excess supply of high-skilled workers. However, there is much debate about the consequences of this phenomena and the short and long term effects for both the overeducated worker and the economy as a whole. This book contributes to our understanding of recent developments in the research on overeducation by providing a detailed overview of the pertinent theoretical and policy issues."

Part of "The Research in Labor Economics" series, this volume is a collection of papers dedicated to the memory of the late Tikva Lecker. Professor Lecker's many interests included topics in labor economics, women and the economy, the economics of Judaism, the economics of migration and the economic experience of immigrants and their descendants.

The 2018/19 edition analyses the gender pay gap. The report focuses on two main challenges: how to find the most useful means for measurement, and how to break down the gender pay gap in ways that best inform policy-makers and social partners of the factors that underlie it. The report also includes a review of key policy issues regarding wages and the reduction of gender pay gaps in different national circumstances.

Distributional issues may not have always been among the main concerns of the economic profession. Today, in the beginning of the 2000s, the position is different. During the last quarter of a century, economic growth proved to be unsteady and rather slow on average. The situation of those at the bottom ceased to improve regularly as in the preceding fast growth and full-employment period. Europe has seen prolonged unemployment and there has been widening wage dispersion in a number of OECD countries. Rising affluence in rich countries coexists, in a number of such countries, with the persistence of poverty. As a consequence, it is difficult nowadays to think of an issue ranking high in the public economic debate without some strong explicit distributive implications. Monetary policy, fiscal policy, taxes, monetary or trade union, privatisation, price and competition regulation, the future of the Welfare State are all issues which are now often perceived as conflictual because of their strong redistributive content. Economists have responded quickly to the renewed general interest in distribution, and the contents of this Handbook are very different from those which would have been included had it been written ten or twenty years ago. It has now become common to have income distribution variables playing a pivotal role in economic models. The recent interest in the relationship between growth and distribution is a good example of this. The surge of political economy in the contemporary literature is also a route by which distribution is coming to re-occupy the place it deserves. Within economics itself, the development of models of imperfect information and informational asymmetries have not only provided a means of resolving the puzzle as to why identical workers get paid different amounts, but have also caused reconsideration of the efficiency of market outcomes. These models indicate that there may not necessarily be an efficiency/equity trade-off; it may be possible to make progress on both fronts. The introduction and subsequent 14 chapters of this Handbook cover in detail all these new developments, insisting at the same time on how they tie with the previous literature on income distribution. The overall perspective is intentionally broad. As with landscapes, adopting various points of view on a given issue may often be the only way of perceiving its essence or reality. Accordingly, income distribution issues in the various chapters of this volume are considered under their theoretical or their empirical side, under a normative or a positive angle, in connection with redistribution policy, in a micro or macro-economic context, in different institutional settings, at various point of space, in a historical or contemporaneous perspective. Specialized readers will go directly to the chapter dealing with the issue or using the approach they are interested in. For them, this Handbook will be a clear and sure reference. To more patient readers who will go through various chapters of this volume, this Handbook should provide the multi-faceted view that seems necessary for a deep understanding of most issues in the field of distribution. For more information on the Handbooks in Economics series, please see our home page on http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/hes

In Dividing the Domestic, leading international scholars roll up their sleeves to investigate how culture and country characteristics permeate our households and our private lives. The book introduces novel frameworks for understanding why the household remains a bastion of traditional gender relations—even when employed full-time, women everywhere still do most of the work around the house, and poor women spend more time on housework than affluent women. Education systems, tax codes, labor laws, public polices, and cultural beliefs about motherhood and marriage all make a difference. Any accounting of "who does what" needs to consider the complicity of trade unions, state arrangements for children's schooling, and new cultural prescriptions for a happy marriage. With its cross-national perspective, this pioneering volume speaks not only to sociologists concerned with gender and family, but also to those interested in scholarship on states, public policy, culture, and social inequality.