ILR Review

Wage Disparities across Immigrant Generations: Education, Segregation, or Unequal Pay?
Han J and Hermansen AS
Immigrants and their native-born children often face considerable wage penalties relative to natives, but less is known about whether this inequality arises through differences in educational qualifications, segregation across occupations and establishments, or unequal pay for the same work. Using linked employer-employee data from Norway, the authors ask whether immigrant-native wage disparities 1) reflect differences in detailed educational qualifications, labor market segregation, or within-job pay differences; 2) differ by immigrant generation; and 3) vary across different segments of the labor market. They find that immigrant-native wage disparities primarily reflect sorting into lower-paying jobs, and that wage disadvantages are considerably reduced across immigrant generations. When doing the same work for the same employer, immigrant-background workers, especially children of immigrants, earn similar wages to natives. Sorting into jobs seems more meritocratic for university graduates, for professionals, and in the public sector, but within-job pay differences are strikingly similar across market segments.
Firm Pay Policies and the Gender Earnings Gap: The Mediating Role of Marital and Family Status
Li J, Dostie B and Simard-Duplain G
Using data from the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database between 2001 and 2015, the authors examine the impact of firms' hiring and pay-setting policies on the gender earnings gap in Canada. Consistent with the existing literature and following Card, Cardoso, and Kline (2016), findings show that firm-specific premiums explain nearly one-quarter of the 26.8% average earnings gap between female and male workers. On average, firms' hiring practices, due to differences in the relative proportion of women hired at high-wage firms (known as sorting), and pay-setting policies, due to differences in pay by gender within similar firms, each explain approximately one-half of this firm effect. The compositional difference between the two channels varies substantially over a worker's life cycle, by parental and marital status, and across provinces.
Remote Work and Post-Bureaucracy: Unintended Consequences of Work Design for Gender Inequality
de Laat K
In-depth interviews with IT employees ( = 84) working under two types of work design-a post-bureaucratic work design labeled "agile," and a bureaucratic work design labeled "waterfall"-are used to examine gendered patterns in the adoption of remote work. Interviews reveal an unintended consequence of the agile model: It promotes a physical orientation that induces on-site work. Agile is gender-inegalitarian, with more women than men working remotely despite its perceived unacceptability, and low numbers of employees working remotely overall. By contrast, workers within a waterfall work design express a digital orientation to work and feel empowered to work remotely. The waterfall model is associated with gender egalitarianism; most employees opt to work remotely, and men and women do so in even numbers. Findings suggest that when compared to the post-bureaucratic work design, the bureaucratic work design provides more flexibility. This article refines our understanding of barriers to remote work and provides a lens on the gender dynamics underlying work design.
Heterogeneous Labor Market Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Cortes GM and Forsythe E
The authors study the distributional consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on employment, both during the onset of the pandemic and over subsequent months. Using cross-sectional and matched longitudinal data from the Current Population Survey, they show that the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities. Although employment losses have been widespread, they have been substantially larger-and more persistent-in lower-paying occupations and industries. Hispanics and non-White workers suffered larger increases in job losses, not only because of their over-representation in lower-paying jobs but also because of a disproportionate increase in their job displacement probability relative to non-Hispanic White workers with the same job background. Gaps in year-on-year job displacement probabilities between Black and White workers have widened over the course of the pandemic recession, both overall and conditional on pre-displacement occupation and industry. These gaps are not explained by state-level differences in the severity of the pandemic nor by the associated response in terms of mitigation policies. In addition, evidence suggests that older workers have been retiring at faster rates.
Schooling and Parental Labor Supply: Evidence from COVID-19 School Closures in the United States
Amuedo-Dorantes C, Marcén M, Morales M and Sevilla A
This article examines changes in parental labor supply in response to the unanticipated closure of schools following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The authors collect detailed daily information on school closures at the school-district level, which they merge to individual-level data on labor supply and sociodemographic characteristics from the monthly Current Population Survey spanning from January 2019 through May 2020. Using a difference-in-differences estimation approach, the authors find evidence of non-negligible labor supply reductions. Having a partner at home helped offset the negative effect of school closures, particularly for maternal employment, although respondents' job traits played a more significant role in shaping labor supply responses to school closures. Overall, the labor supply impacts of school closures prove robust to identification checks and to controlling for other coexistent social distancing measures. In addition, these early school closures seem to have had a long-lasting negative impact on parental labor supply.
UNCERTAIN TIME: PRECARIOUS SCHEDULES AND JOB TURNOVER IN THE US SERVICE SECTOR
Choper J, Schneider D and Harknett K
The authors develop a model of cumulative disadvantage relating three axes of disadvantage for hourly workers in the US retail and food service sectors: schedule instability, turnover, and earnings. In this model, exposure to unstable work schedules disrupts workers' family and economic lives, straining the employment relation and increasing the likelihood of turnover, which can then lead to earnings losses. Drawing on new panel data from 1,827 hourly workers in retail and food service collected as part of the Shift Project, the authors demonstrate that exposure to schedule instability is a strong, robust predictor of turnover for workers with relatively unstable schedules (about one-third of the sample). Slightly less than half of this relationship is mediated by job satisfaction and another quarter by work-family conflict. Job turnover is generally associated with earnings losses due to unemployment, but workers leaving jobs with moderately unstable schedules experience earnings growth upon re-employment.
Multiple Discrimination against Female Immigrants Wearing Headscarves
Weichselbaumer D
Western countries have experienced a large influx of Muslim immigrants, and concomitantly the Muslim headscarf has become the subject of major controversy. Drawing on theories of stigma, social identity, and multiple discrimination/intersectionality, this study examines the effect of wearing this headscarf in the German labor market. The author applies the method of correspondence testing that allows measuring discrimination in a controlled field setting. Findings show that when applying for a job in Germany, women with a Turkish migration background are less likely to be invited for an interview, and the level of discrimination increases substantially if the applicant wears a headscarf. The results suggest that immigrant women who wear a headscarf suffer discrimination based on multiple stigmas related to ethnicity and religion.
TO THE NEW WORLD AND BACK AGAIN: RETURN MIGRANTS IN THE AGE OF MASS MIGRATION
Abramitzky R, Boustan L and Eriksson K
The authors compile large data sets from Norwegian and US historical censuses to study return migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913). Norwegian immigrants who returned to Norway held lower-paid occupations than did Norwegian immigrants who stayed in the United States, both before and after their first transatlantic migration, suggesting they were negatively selected from the migrant pool. Upon returning to Norway, return migrants held higher-paid occupations relative to Norwegians who never moved, despite hailing from poorer backgrounds. These patterns suggest that despite being negatively selected, return migrants had been able to accumulate savings and could improve their economic circumstances once they returned home.
Choosing a Control Group for Displaced Workers
Krolikowski P
The vast majority of studies on the earnings of displaced workers use a control group of never displaced workers to examine the effects of initial displacements. This approach attributes earnings declines due to all future job instability to the initial displacement event, overstating the losses relative to the average treatment effect. This paper's approach isolates the impact of an average displacement without conditioning on future displacement status in the control group. In comparisons of the standard and alternative approaches using PSID data, the estimated long-run earnings losses fall dramatically from 25 percent to as low as 5 percent.
The Complexity of Immigrant Generations: Implications for Assessing the Socioeconomic Integration of Hispanics and Asians
Duncan B and Trejo SJ
Because of data limitations, virtually all studies of the later-generation descendants of immigrants rely on subjective measures of ethnic self-identification rather than arguably more objective measures based on the countries of birth of the respondent and his ancestors. In this context, biases can arise from "ethnic attrition" (e.g., U.S.-born individuals who do not self-identify as Hispanic despite having ancestors who were immigrants from a Spanish-speaking country). Analyzing 2003-2013 data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), this study shows that such ethnic attrition is sizeable and selective for the second- and third-generation populations of key Hispanic and Asian national origin groups. In addition, the results indicate that ethnic attrition generates measurement biases that vary across groups in direction as well as magnitude, and that correcting for these biases is likely to raise the socioeconomic standing of the U.S.-born descendants of Hispanic immigrants relative to their Asian counterparts.
Filling the Holes: Work Schedulers as Job Crafters of Employment Practice in Long-Term Health Care
Kossek EE, Piszczek MM, Mcalpine KL, Hammer LB and Burke L
Although work schedulers serve an organizational role influencing decisions about balancing conflicting stakeholder interests over schedules and staffing, scheduling has primarily been described as an objective activity or individual job characteristic. The authors use the lens of job crafting to examine how schedulers in 26 health care facilities enact their roles as they "fill holes" to schedule workers. Qualitative analysis of interview data suggests that schedulers expand their formal scope and influence to meet their interpretations of how to manage stakeholders (employers, workers, and patients). The authors analyze variations in the extent of job crafting (cognitive, physical, relational) to broaden role repertoires. They find evidence that some schedulers engage in rule-bound interpretation to avoid role expansion. They also identify four types of schedulers: enforcers, patient-focused schedulers, employee-focused schedulers, and balancers. The article adds to the job-crafting literature by showing that job crafting is conducted not only to create meaningful work but also to manage conflicting demands and to mediate among the competing labor interests of workers, clients, and employers.
WORK CONTINUATION WHILE TREATED FOR BREAST CANCER: THE ROLE OF WORKPLACE ACCOMMODATIONS
Neumark D, Bradley CJ, Henry M and Dahman B
Given the short- and long-term disabilities associated with breast cancer and its treatment, the authors investigate the influence of workplace accommodations on the employment and hours worked of women newly diagnosed with breast cancer. Accommodations that allow women to work fewer hours or that ease the burden of work could also generate health benefits by reducing workplace demands and allowing women more time to tend to treatment needs and recovery. In prior research, the authors found modest labor supply impacts on employment for this group of women. Evidence from this study suggests that some accommodations are associated with fewer hours worked, while some are associated with higher employment or hours. In addition, some of the accommodations that may affect hours of work-sometimes positively and sometimes negatively-are associated with positive health benefits.
The Wage Effects of Personal Smoking History
Grafova IB and Stafford FP
Why do we observe a wage differential between smokers and non-smokers? Pooling reports of current and prior smoking activity across 15 years from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) allows the reconstruction of individual smoking histories. Dividing the sample into smoking history groups, the four largest of which are: , , , and reveals that there is no observed wage gap between former smokers and those who have never smoked. There is, however, a wage gap between those smokers who will continue smoking and three other groups of individuals: (1) those smokers who will quit smoking in the future, (2) those smokers who have quit smoking already, and (3) those who never smoked. The wage gap between smokers and non-smokers, observed in the 1986 cross-section, is largely driven by those who persist as smokers, 1986-2001. These results support the hypothesis that the cross-sectional wage differential is not driven by smoking per se, but may be driven by a non-causal explanation. One plausible interpretation is that a common factor such as myopia, leads to reduced investment in both health capital or firm-specific or other human capital.
Unionized professionals and the scope of bargaining: a study of nurses
Ponak AM
Sex discrimination in a paramedical profession
Zincone LH and Close FA
The job rights of strikers in the public sector
Schramm LH
Sex differentials in the earnings of Ph.D.s
Ferber MA and Kordick B
Using a survey of two cohorts of men and women who received Ph.D.s in the years 1958-63 and 1967-72, the authors test two hypotheses: (1) that the relatively lower earnings of highly educated women can be explained largely by their career interruptions and by their lesser willingness to accumulate human capital in anticipation of such interruptions, and (2) that the differential in earnings between men and women increases with age because of career interruptions and that the gap narrows once women reenter the labor force on a permanent basis The findings do not lend support to either of these hypotheses, leading the authors to reject the proposition that the lower rewards of women Ph.D.s are primarily caused by their own voluntary decisions.
Unionized professionals and the scope of bargaining: a study of nurses
Ponak AM
The union impact on hospital wages and fringe benefits
Feldman R and Scheffler R
Compensation for death from asbestos
Johnson WG and Heler E
Western miners and silicosis: "The scourge of the underground toiler," 1890-1943
Foster JC