Over the past half-century, there have been significant advances towards workplace gender equality. However, Australia’s working women continue to earn less than men. A key reason is that occupational segregation has maintained very high levels of feminisation in frontline care and other occupations, including in many ‘ancillary’ or supportive roles, which employ large numbers of women and where skills may not be readily recognised and valued. This article explores the way one set of highly segregated ancillary occupations, receptionists, are vulnerable to gender-based undervaluation and argues that this group warrants further attention in strategies to promote workplace gender equality. First, the article outlines the legislative changes, which have recast regulatory attention to low pay and undervaluation in highly feminised occupations and industries, then draws on Australian Bureau of Statistics data to show the presence of several ancillary occupations among Australia’s most feminised. The article then narrows to examine health care reception and reviews the small body of literature that explores the complex, invisible skills this work involves. The example of health care reception underlines the need for gender equality strategies that challenge constructions of women’s jobs as peripheral and subordinate to male-dominated roles, and which recognise and make visible the skills and contributions that women make in a fuller range of feminised occupations.

Our spatial general equilibrium model evaluates the impact of stamp duty reforms on social welfare through two channels: the direct positive impact on housing market outcomes and the indirect boost to national productivity due to better labor allocation. Analyzing detailed spatial data from Australia, we find that reducing stamp duties generates welfare gains of 3.57%, with the productivity channel accounting for 95% of these gains. This highlights the significant benefits of stamp duty reforms beyond the housing market.

In response to tire failures and vehicle rollover accidents, most notably those experienced by Ford Explorers with Firestone Tires, the 106th Congress and President Clinton enacted the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation (TREAD) Act of 2000. Section 13 of the TREAD Act requires vehicle manufacturers to install tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS) that alert drivers when a tire is significantly under-inflated. This paper first discusses the political economy that ultimately led to the final TREAD Act TPMS regulation. Then, relying on the variation of model-year TPMS introduction, I investigate whether and to what extent TPMS reduces all vehicle fatalities and those associated with tire failure and improper inflation. I find that the introduction of TPMS is associated with just over 11 fewer tire failure-related deaths per year, resulting in a net benefit of −$752 million to −$1,876 million (in $2001) per year. I find no change in the number of tire inflation-related fatalities with the introduction of TPMS.

The study is based on data from Chinese listed companies and explores the impact of a company’s position in the global value chain (GVC) on internal wage distribution and income inequality. The results show that although the improvement of GVC status in enterprises has increased the average salary level of all employees, it has exacerbated the wage gap between management and grassroots employees, leading to widening income inequality, mainly achieved through rent-sharing mechanisms. In addition, companies with higher human capital can alleviate the income inequality effect caused by the rise of GVC status. Further analysis reveals that the impact of GVC status on internal income inequality in enterprises is heterogeneous regarding property rights, employee bargaining power, and enterprise size. The study provides a new perspective on exploring the income distribution effects of the GVC from a micro perspective, emphasising that enterprises need to pay attention to building a fair and reasonable income distribution structure while being open to others at a high level. It is significant for promoting the construction of micro-mechanisms based on enterprises, fostering social equity and inclusive growth.

Motivated by problems of coordination failure in organizations, we examine how overcoming coordination failure and maintaining coordination depend on the ability of individuals to observe others’ choices. Subjects’ payoffs depend on coordinating at high effort levels in a weak-link game. Treatments vary along two dimensions. First, subjects either start with low financial incentives for coordination, which typically leads to coordination failure, and then are switched to higher incentives or start with high incentives, which usually yield effective coordination, and are switched to low incentives. Second, as the key treatment variable, subjects either observe the effort levels chosen by all individuals in their experimental group (full feedback) or observe only the minimum effort (limited feedback). We find three primary results: (1) When starting from coordination failure the use of full feedback improves subjects’ ability to overcome coordination failure, (2) When starting with good coordination the use of full feedback has no effect on subjects’ ability to avoid slipping into coordination failure, and (3) History-dependence, defined as dependence of current effort levels on past incentives, is strengthened by the use of full feedback.

Exogeneous disruptions in labor demand have become more frequent in recent times. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in millions of workers being repeatedly laid off and rehired according to local public health conditions. This may be bad news for market efficiency. Typical employment relations—which resemble non-enforceable (implicit) contracts—rely on reciprocity (Brown et al. in Econometrica 72:747–780, 2004), and hence could be harmed when workers’ efforts no longer guarantee reemployment in the next period. In this paper we extend the BFF paradigm to include a per-period probability (0%, 10%, 50%) of publicly observable “shutdown”, where a specific firm cannot contract with any workers for several periods. A Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium exists in which these shutdowns destabilize relationships, but do not harm efficiency. Our experiment shows that, remarkably, market efficiency can be maintained even with very frequent stochastic shutdowns. However, the dynamic of relational contracts changes from one where a worker finds stable employment to one where she juggles multiple employers, laying the burden of maintaining productivity upon workers and worsening worker-side inequality.

We investigate how employee potential influences wage offers and effort exertion in a gift exchange experiment. In particular, we test if gift exchange based on a commonly accepted norm for wage differentiation can emerge in a setting where the wage demands of agents are heterogeneous. We also analyse how communication by principals responds to the unequal wage demands and how it influences agents’ decisions about working effort in the presence of varying degrees of bargaining power. We find that differences in productivity and the resulting entitlements lead to differentiation in wages. High productivity agents are offered substantially higher wages than low productivity agents. Results from a control experiment suggest that a large part of this wage markup is related to the future productivity potential of high performers. At the same time, unequal wage schemes do not substantially crowd out effort exertion: we observe no strong detrimental effects from disadvantageous relative wage positions. Certain communication patterns significantly influence effort exertion.

Using combined experimental and survey data, this paper provides empirical evidence that firm productivity is related to worker's pro-social behavior in the workplace. At the firm level, we find a strong positive relationship between firm productivity and reciprocating behavior among workers. Investigating workers’ individual behavior we find a similar, strong relationship when regressing earnings, a proxy for productivity, on reciprocity. To address simultaneity we use an instrumental variable approach and find that the initial estimate was upwards biased, presumably because it did not take into account the positive feedback from earnings to reciprocity. The new coefficient remains substantially above zero, but it is statistically insignificant.

Firms face an optimization problem that requires a maximal quantity output given a quality constraint. But how do firms incentivize quantity and quality to meet these dual goals, and what role do behavioral factors, such as loss aversion, play in the tradeoffs workers face? We address these questions with a theoretical model and an experiment in which participants are paid for both quantity and quality of a real effort task. Consistent with basic economic theory, higher quality incentives encourage participants to shift their attention from quantity to quality. However, we also find that loss averse participants shift their attention from quality to quantity to a greater degree when quality is weakly incentivized. These results can inform managers of appropriate ways to structure contracts, and suggest benefits to personalizing contracts based on individual behavioral characteristics.

We explore gender attitudes towards competition in the United Arab Emirates—a traditionally patriarchal society which in recent times has adopted numerous policies to empower women and promote their role in the labor force. The experimental treatments vary whether individuals compete in single-sex or mixed-sex groups. In contrast to previous studies, women in our sample are not less willing to compete than men. In fact, once we control for individual performance, Emirati women are more likely to select into competition. Our analysis shows that neither women nor men shy away from competition, and both compete more than what would be optimal in monetary terms as the fraction of men in their group increases. We offer a detailed survey of the literature and discuss possible reasons for the lack of gender differences in our experiment.

Statistical discrimination offers a compelling narrative on gender wage gaps among younger workers. Employers could reduce women's wages to adjust for expected costs linked to child-bearing. If this is the case, then trends toward delayed fertility should reduce the gender wage gap among young workers. We provide a novel collection of adjusted gender wage gap (AGWG) estimates among young workers from 56 countries spanning four decades and use it to test the conjecture that delayed fertility reduces gender wage inequality. We employ instrumental variables, and find that one year postponement of the first birth reduces AGWG by two percentage points (15% of the AGWG). We benchmark this estimate with the help of time-use data.

Relying upon an original (country-sector-year) measure of robotic capital ($RK$), we investigate the degree of complementarity/substitutability between robots and workers at different skill levels. We employ nonparametric methods to estimate elasticity of substitution patterns between $RK$ and skilled/unskilled labor over the period 1995–2009. We show that: i) on average, $RK$ exhibits less substitutability with skilled workers compared to unskilled workers, indicating a phenomenon of “RK-Skill complementarity”. This pattern holds in a global context characterized by significant heterogeneity; ii) the dynamic of “RK-Skill complementarity” has increased since the early 2000s; iii) the observed strengthening is more prominent in OECD countries, as opposed to non-OECD countries, and in the Manufacturing sector, compared to non-Manufacturing industries.

This study utilises panel data of 46 countries from 2005 to 2019 to examine the impact of digital service trade (DST) on inclusive growth. Inclusive growth is a growth model that promotes economic growth and development, while also building social equity and inclusiveness and balancing environmental sustainability. The findings indicate that a nation’s DST development significantly fosters domestic economic growth and development, specifically through its employment enhancement effect. DST substantially promotes social equity and inclusiveness, mainly through the inclusive innovation effect. However, DST is also found to increase carbon emissions, impeding environmentally sustainable growth, specifically via the energy demand effect. Hence, DST exerts diverse impacts on different facets of inclusiveness. The study also reveals heterogeneity in the effects of DST on the three aspects of inclusive growth related to trade’s import–export dynamics, income levels, and DST barrier intensities. This paper contributes to and refines the body of research on the relationship between DST and inclusive growth. It offers policy suggestions for crafting more open and mutually beneficial DST policies to foster social equity and inclusive global trade.

We study whether the increased adoption of available automation technologies allows economies to avoid the negative effect of aging on per capita output. We develop a quantitative theory in which firms choose to which extent they automate in response to a declining workforce and rising old-age dependency. An important element in our model is the integration of two capital types: automation capital that acts as a substitute to human labor, and traditional capital that is a complement to labor. Empirically, our model's predictions largely match data regarding automation (robotization) density across OECD countries. Simulating the model, we find that aging-induced automation only partially compensates the negative growth effect of aging in the absence of technical progress in automation technology. One reason is that automated tasks are no perfect substitutes for non-automated tasks. A second reason is that automation raises the interest rate and thus inhibits positive behavioral reactions to aging (later retirement and investment in human capital). Moreover, increased automation generates a falling net labor share of income and rising welfare inequality. We evaluate alternative policy responses to cope with this inequality.

On 1 January 2016, China further relaxed its family planning policy and adopted the universal two-child policy, which allows any Chinese couple to have two children to address the country’s increasingly severe ageing problems and low fertility. With this shift comes a direct and profound impact on society, especially women; this paper evaluates the effect of the universal two-child policy on the gender wage gap and its mechanism. Several major conclusions emerge from this analysis. The policy significantly expands the urban gender wage gap by 12.86% in the low-policy-fertility-rate (PFR) provinces versus high-PFR provinces. Evidently, it increases the gap among younger or lower-educated people. Moreover, the severity of gender discrimination in the labour market after the implementation of the universal two-child policy is rising, and deserves further attention.

This study relies on a linear programming model to estimate welfare ratios in Spain between 1600 and 1800. This method is used to find the food basket that guaranteed the intake of basic nutrients at the lowest cost. The estimates show that working families in Toledo had higher welfare ratios than in those in Barcelona. In addition, the welfare ratios of Spain were always below those of London and Amsterdam. The divergence between Northern Europe and Spain started before the Industrial Revolution and increased over time.

Several decades ago, Sig Prais concluded that the root cause of the UK’s poor industrial performance was the poor quality of education and training. In this lecture, I will make a related argument, focussing on the lack of opportunity in the United Kingdom for workers who have not succeeded in the formal education system and the long-lasting impacts this has on their economic, health and social wellbeing. I will highlight the importance of providing opportunities for continued training over a worker’s lifetime for appropriate skills that are valued in the workplace in order to achieve inclusive growth.

This study investigates the relationship between occupational skills and wages in Thailand using the Labour Force Survey from 1985 to 2020. We quantify the contribution of changes in the skill requirement and highlight the increase in the return on the ‘brain’ and the decrease in the penalty on ‘brawn’, which helps explain the wage distribution changes across periods. We further explore the polarisation in the labour market and analyse the changes in the wage distribution by applying the decomposition method proposed by Firpo et al (2009). Our results suggest that wage dispersion increases in the top end over the first two time periods but decreases in the third time period, while it continues to decrease in the lower end of the distribution.

The introduction of the 2012 Labour Code is considered ‘groundbreaking’ in industrial relations in Vietnam. However, knowledge about the effects of this law is still minimal. This study provides the first evidence of the impacts of the law on worker outcomes, disaggregated by location and migration status. The Vietnam Labour Force Survey is used as the primary dataset. Both difference-in-differences and fixed-effect models are applied in the investigation. The estimated results show a relationship between the introduction of the law and the labour supply of contracted workers in urban areas, especially long-term migrant workers. Furthermore, income for these long-term migrant contract workers was affected significantly by the introduction of the law. A link between the law and health insurance participation was also found among non-migrant contracted workers in urban areas. We also perform estimations using a short panel sample and find notable results. The study likewise reveals disadvantages of rural workers compared to urban workers in terms of earnings, and of short-term migrants compared to other workers, in terms of labour supply.

This research note documents the revision of a dataset of real wages in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela during 1920-2011. This resource was originally published by this journal in Astorga (2017). The revision affected all eighteen basic wage series plus six weighted-average series, with varying degrees of modification. The revised dataset is made available as supplementary material. Regardless of changes to the data, the key findings and conclusions of the 2017 paper still hold.