Unexplained Gap Research Articles

Marital Status and Mothers' Time Use: Childcare, Housework, Leisure, and Sleep.

Assumptions that single mothers are "time poor" compared with married mothers are ubiquitous. We tested theorized associations derived from the time poverty thesis and the gender perspective using the 2003-2012 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS). We found marital status differentiated housework, leisure, and sleep time, but did not influence the amount of time that mothers provided childcare. Net of the number of employment hours, married mothers did more housework and slept less than never-married and divorced mothers, counter to expectations of the time poverty thesis. Never-married and cohabiting mothers reported more total and more sedentary leisure time than married mothers. We assessed the influence of demographic differences among mothers to account for variation in their time use by marital status. Compositional differences explained more than two-thirds of the variance in sedentary leisure time between married and never-married mothers, but only one-third of the variance between married and cohabiting mothers. The larger unexplained gap in leisure quality between cohabiting and married mothers is consistent with the gender perspective.

The Gender Wage Gap Among College Graduates in Italy

The paper investigates the gender wage gap among recently graduates, controlling for job and academic variables and for the field of study, as women lag behind in highly remunerative majors. The raw gender differential in hourly wages is 5.6%. Although including academic variables and the field of study—on top of job-related variables—slightly reduces the unexplained gap, the latter still accounts for most of the total difference. Using quantile decomposition, the paper shows that the unexplained gap increases along the wage distribution, indicating a glass ceiling effect. Heterogeneities arise among fields of study: the largest total gap emerges in Law, Political-Social sciences, and Economics-Statistics. In most disciplines, there is a significant unexplained gap—from 3.3% (Medicine), to 8.7% (Law), up to 9.6% (Agriculture)—which constitutes the largest share of the difference, confirming that most of the wage gap remains unexplained also by major. Finally, I use geographical differences to explore the influence of institutional and macro-economic variables, as well as of attitudes towards gender norms. The results indicate that childcare and part-time employment availability are correlated with lower gender wage gaps, while traditional gender norms are associated with higher differentials.

Does Migration Motive Matter for Migrants' Employment Outcomes? The Case of Belgium

Despite being one of the most prolific spenders on active labour market policies, and investing heavily in civic integration programmes, family policies and career and diversity plans, the native-migrant employment gap in Belgium is still one of the largest among EU and OECD countries. Past research has shown that even after controlling for human capital and other socio-demographic factors a large unexplained gap (often called ethnic gap or penalty) remains. This paper investigates how the motive for migrating to Belgium contributes to the native-migrant employment gap.Based on data from the 2014 Belgian LFS Ad Hoc Module on the labour market situation of migrants and their immediate descendants, we compare the employment outcomes of labour migrants (with and without a job prior to migration), family reunion migrants, student migrants and refugees with those of the native-born. In line with previous studies, we establish that refugees and family reunion migrants' employment likelihood is lower when compared to labour migrants and natives. Refugees who do work tend to do so in temporary jobs and in jobs that are below their skill levels. However, temporary employment is also prevalent among labour migrants without a job prior to migration and over qualification is a specific challenge for male student migrants.

The EU Gender Earnings Gap: Job Segregation and Working Time as Driving Factors

AbstractThis paper estimates size and impact factors of the gender pay gap in Europe. It adds to the literature in three aspects. First, we update existing figures on the gender pay gaps in the EU based on the Structure of Earnings Survey 2010 (SES). Second, we enrich the literature by undertaking comprehensive country comparisons of the gap components based on an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. Overall, we analyse 21 EU countries plus Norway, which clearly exceeds the scope of existing microdata studies. Third, we examine the sources of the unexplained gap. We find that about one third of the gap can be traced back to the role of the explanatory factors included in our analysis. Human capital related factors are of minor importance. Instead, the sectoral segregation of genders is identified as the most important barrier to gender pay equality in European countries. In addition, the fact that part-time positions are more frequent among women notably contributes to the gap. Furthermore, sector premiums are generally to men’s advantage, this might point to a less advanta-geous within-sector positional sorting for women compared to men. We conclude that policies aiming at closing the gender pay gap should focus more on the sector level than on the aggregate economy.

The Gender Wealth Gap Across European Countries

This paper studies the gap in wealth between male and female single households using 2010 Household Finance and Consumption Survey data for eight European countries. In the raw data, a large gap emerges at the upper end of the unconditional distribution. While OLS estimates show no difference in average net wealth levels, quantile regressions at the 95th percentile yield mixed evidence for the gender wealth gap in different specifications. Labour market characteristics and participation in asset and debt categories largely explain the differences between male and female single households. The gender gap in net wealth is driven by gaps in gross wealth and its components, but is attenuated in four countries by gender gaps in (collateralized) debt. In the full specification, the unexplained gap in gross wealth amounts to 27 percent in Slovakia, 33 percent in France, 44 percent in Austria, 45 percent in Germany, and 48 percent in Greece.

The Gender Wage Gap Among College Graduates in Italy

The paper investigates the gender wage gap among recently graduated people, controlling for job and academic variables and for the field of study, as women lag in highly remunerative majors. The raw gender gap in hourly wages is 5.6%. Although including academic variables and the field of study, on top of job-related variables, slightly reduces the unexplained gap, the latter still accounts for most of the total difference. Using quantile decomposition, the paper shows that the unexplained gap increases along the wage distribution, indicating a glass ceiling effect. Heterogeneities arise across fields of study: the largest total gap emerges in Law, Political-Social sciences, and Economics-Statistics. In most disciplines, there is a significant unexplained gap – from 3.3% (Medicine), to 8.7% (Law), up to 9.6% (Agriculture) – which constitutes the largest share of the difference, confirming that most of the wage gap remains unexplained also by major. Finally, I use geographical differences to explore the influence of institutional and macro-economic variables, as well as of attitudes towards gender norms. Results indicate that childcare and part-time availability are correlated with lower gender wage gaps, while traditional gender norms are associated with higher gaps.

Los Alumnos Indígenas en México: Siete Hipótesis sobre el Rezago en los Aprendizajes de Nivel Primario / Indigenous Students in Mexico: Seven Hypothesis about the Learning Gap at the Primary Level

A decomposition of the learning gap between indigenous and non-indigenous 6th grade Mexican students is carried out, in order to identify which factors, explain it. Four groups of factors are contrasted: socioeconomic (student and his/her family), school resources, cultural relevance of the educational model and discrimination at the school level, and test language. Multi-level regression models and Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions are estimated for Spanish and Mathematics results. Hypotheses are developed in order to allow indirect estimation of the incidence of the last two. The results show greater effects of socioeconomic factors than school factors; a significant reduction of the gaps in both knowledge areas (55-70%) as a consequence of these factors; A greater proportion of the gap explained in mathematics than in Spanish; practically nonexistent interaction effects between school type and the student’s ethnic condition. Explanations that emphasize the relevance of the socioeconomic marginalization of indigenous students are strengthened, against the role of school resources, the irrelevance of the educational model or discrimination mechanisms. A lower proportion of unexplained gaps in mathematics strengthens an alternative, more parsimonious hypothesis: a significant part of the gap derives from the fact that indigenous students are not evaluated in their first language.

Missing from the Market: Purdah Norm and Women's Paid Work Participation in Bangladesh

Despite significant improvement in female schooling over the last two decades, only a small proportion of women in South Asia are in wage employment. We revisit this puzzle using a nationally representative data set from Bangladesh. Probit regression results show that even after accounting for human capital endowments, women are systematically less likely to participate in paid work than men. Oaxaca decomposition of the gender gap confirms that most of it (i.e. 95%) is unexplained by endowment differences. Instead, community norms such as the practice of purdah (i.e. female seclusion) have a statistically significant and negative effect on women's participation in paid work. We do not find any evidence that purdah norm variable affect paid work participation indirectly, via determining the labor force participation decision. The correlation between current work participation and purdah norm in natal household is insignificant confirming that the result is not driven by omitted individual-specific socio-economic factors. We also use data on past purdah practice of the current community to estimate an instrumental variable Probit regression model and rule out the possibility of reverse causality. Detailed decomposition analysis reveals that community purdah norm accounts for a quarter of the total unexplained gap. The findings are robust to controls for the influence of co-resident in-laws, household structure, marital status, and a wide range of community characteristics such as ecological factors, presence of NGOs, provision of public infrastructure, remoteness and local labor market conditions including the norm of unacceptability of unmarried women's outside work in the community.

A comparison of financial literacy between native and immigrant school students

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the gap in Financial Literacy (FL) between native and immigrant 15-year-old school students using data from the 2012 PISA Financial Literacy Assessment. The size of the gap is about 0.15 standard deviations, going up to 0.3 for first-generation immigrants. This is partly because immigrants have poorer economic background, parents that work in lower-skilled jobs, do not speak the test language at home and are placed in later student cohorts. Controlling for this via OLS or matching reduces the unexplained gap, but it still remains significant and displays considerable country-level heterogeneity. It ceases to be significant when the Math score is partialled out.

Investigating the Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity: Evidence from Uganda

Women comprise 50 percent of the agricultural labor force in Sub-Saharan Africa, but manage plots that are reportedly on average 20 to 30 percent less productive. As a source of income inequality and aggregate productivity loss, the country-specific magnitude and drivers of this gender gap are of great interest. Using national data from the Uganda National Panel Survey for 2009/10 and 2010/11, the gap before controlling for endowments was estimated to be 17.5 percent. Panel data methods were combined with an Oaxaca decomposition to investigate the gender differences in resource endowment and return to endowment driving this gap. Although men have greater access to inputs, input use is so low and inverse returns to plot size so strong in Uganda that smaller female-managed plots have a net endowment advantage of 12 percent, revealing a larger unexplained gap of 29.5 percent. Two-fifths of this unexplained gap is attributed to differential returns to the child dependency ratio and one-fifth to differential returns to transport access, implying that greater child care responsibilities and difficulty accessing input and output markets from areas without transport are the largest drivers of the gap. Smaller and less robust drivers include differential uptake of cash crops, and differential uptake and return to improved seeds and pesticides.

Expert performance of men and women: A cross-cultural study in the chess domain

There is a persistent higher performance of men over women in chess that has been attributed to the disproportioned participation rates of men and women in this domain, but also to biological and cultural factors. This study addresses the disparity between men and women in performance at the expert chess level. Actual sex differences in chess performance were contrasted with differences estimated from the divergent participation rates of men and women chess players from twenty-four countries in the Eurasian region. There was a male advantage in chess performance throughout all countries. Sex differences in chess performance emerged for all the studied countries, with remarkable and highly variable unexplained gaps that were unrelated to the men versus women ratios. The cross-country variability about sex differences in chess performance indicates differences in geographical and cultural factors that might elicit differential participation rates, starting age, and perseverance in the domain for men and women. These differences are also likely to underlie the remarkable disparity in expert chess performance of men and women than only differential participation rates.

THE ORIGIN OF THE COSMIC GAMMA-RAY BACKGROUND IN THE MeV RANGE

ABSTRACT There has been much debate about the origin of the diffuse γ-ray background in the MeV range. At lower energies, AGNs and Seyfert galaxies can explain the background, but not above ≃0.3 MeV. Beyond ∼10 MeV blazars appear to account for the flux observed. That leaves an unexplained gap for which different candidates have been proposed, including annihilations of WIMPS. One candidate is Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). Early studies concluded that they were able to account for the γ-ray background in the gap, while later work attributed a significantly lower contribution to them. All those estimates were based on SN Ia explosion models that did not reflect the full 3D hydrodynamics of SN Ia explosions. In addition, new measurements obtained since 2010 have provided new, direct estimates of high-z SN Ia rates beyond z ∼ 2. We take into account these new advances to see the predicted contribution to the gamma-ray background. We use here a wide variety of explosion models and a plethora of new measurements of SN Ia rates. SNe Ia still fall short of the observed background. Only for a fit, which would imply ∼150% systematic error in detecting SN Ia events, do the theoretical predictions approach the observed fluxes. This fit is, however, at odds at the highest redshifts with recent SN Ia rate estimates. Other astrophysical sources such as flat-spectrum radio quasars do match the observed flux levels in the MeV regime, while SNe Ia make up to 30%–50% of the observed flux.

Rift to drift transition in the South Atlantic salt basins: A new flavor of oceanic crust

The crustal structure of the continent-ocean transition zone in the South Atlantic salt basins is poorly understood. Current interpretations place the limits of oceanic crust at the distal salt limits, with sub-salt crust consisting of rifted continental crust and, in some versions, varying amounts of exhumed mantle. Plate reconstructions that map these limits of oceanic crust onto appropriate-age restorations show poor geometric fits, with unexplained gaps and overlaps. One possible reason for the poor fits is that the distal salt limits are not the real limits of oceanic crust. In this paper we investigate this option by mapping rift basins and seaward-dipping reflectors whose seaward edges mark significant structural boundaries as much as 300 km inboard of the distal salt limits. We interpret these boundaries, which match geometrically in a salt-age (Aptian) plate reconstruction, to be the limits of oceanic crust. We suggest that salt was deposited as seafloor spreading commenced and that, as the South Atlantic opened, salt flowed over the ridge axis, sealing off the extrusive component of oceanic crust, resulting in formation of intrusive oceanic crust. Seafloor spreading eventually broke through the thinning salt, forming breakthrough volcanoes preserved today as basement ramps at the distal salt limits. These ramps formed diachronously, so the distal salt limits are not isochrons, explaining the poor fit of these features in plate reconstructions.

Non-parametric decomposition and the choice of reference group

Purpose – The Ñopo (2008) method of non-parametric decomposition, a matching-based alternative to Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder’s (1973) method of wage gap decomposition, is subject to the so-called “index number problem” common to the Oaxaca-Blinder and many related methods: its results are sensitive to the (arbitrary) choice of either male or female sex as the reference category in decomposition. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by proposing an extension to the method that is invariant to the choice of reference category. Design/methodology/approach – The Ñopo method is modified such that the wage structure of the average worker instead of either male or female worker’s is used as the reference, enabling one to distinguish the “male advantage” and “female advantage” portions of the gender wage gap. As an illustration, a decomposition of the gender wage gap is performed with the modified method, using data from 15 OECD countries. Findings – The empirical results using the Ñopo decomposition indicate substantial differences in estimates of the unexplained gap depending on which sex is used as the reference category. Moreover, this disparity varies significantly with the choice of covariates used in the decomposition. This confirms there is significant cross-country variation in the asymmetry between male advantage and female disadvantage and that a decomposition method making this explicit would be relevant in real world settings. Originality/value – The extension of the Ñopo method proposed in this paper offers a way of decomposing the wage gaps in a way that is not sensitive to the choice of the reference category.

Gender Discrimination in Earnings in Indonesia: A Fuller Picture

This article analyses data from the 2007 Indonesia Family Life Survey in order to decompose the gender gap in earnings into explained and unexplained gaps, not only at the mean but also across the entire distribution. Women earned about 30% less than men, in both paid work and self-employment. The explained gap accounts for only about a quarter of the gap in paid work but for about half of the gap in self-employment. When the decomposition is made across the earnings distribution, the total gap decreases with earnings in both paid work and self-employment, and both conditional and unconditional on characteristics. In both employment sectors, the explained gap remains similar across the distribution, and therefore the unexplained gap drives the decrease in the total gap. The unconditional decomposition across the distribution provides great insight into the dynamics that are obscured in results derived from decomposition at the mean.

The levelling effect of product market competition on gender wage discrimination

Abstract Using linked employer–employee panel data for West Germany that include direct information on the competition faced by plants, we investigate the effect of product market competition on the gender pay gap. Controlling for match fixed effects, we find that intensified competition significantly lowers the unexplained gap in plants with neither collective agreements nor a works council. Conversely, there is no effect in plants with these types of worker codetermination, which are unlikely to have enough discretion to adjust wages in the short run. We also document a larger competition effect in plants with few females in their workforces. Our findings are in line with Beckerian taste-based employer wage discrimination that is limited by competitive forces. JEL codes: J16, J31, J71

Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases

This paper assesses and decomposes gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Decompositions show that most of the unexplained disparity appears to emerge during charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding. The approach provides an important complement to prior disparity studies, which have focused on sentencing and have not incorporated disparities arising from those earlier stages. I also consider various plausible causal theories that could explain the estimated gender gap, using the rich dataset to test their implications.

Occupational Characteristics and the Obesity Wage Penalty

This paper demonstrates that obese women are more likely to work in jobs that emphasize physical activity, but they are less likely to work in jobs that emphasize public interaction. The same patterns in occupational characteristics do not exist for obese men. In light of prior literature finding an unexplained wage gap between obese women and non-obese women, these results are particularly relevant since physical activity jobs pay relatively less on average, while public interaction jobs pay relatively more. Moreover, the few obese women who work in public interaction occupations receive lower wages than non-obese women, and their wage penalty offsets the general premium to working in a job emphasizing public interaction. Together, these results suggest that taste-based discrimination may be driving occupational sorting among obese women and, as a result, is at least one source of the wage penalty experienced by obese women.

Metabolic Acidosis with a Raised Anion Gap Associated with High 5-Oxoproline Levels; An Under-Recognized Cause for Metabolic Acidosis in Intensive Care

Metabolic acidosis is a common problem in ICU patients. Frequent causes of metabolic acidosis with a raised anion gap include lactic acidosis and ketoacidosis. In recent years high anion gap acidosis due to acquired 5- oxoprolinuria has been reported in association with chronic paracetamol use 1. There have been occasional reports of acidosis due to 5-oxoproline in an ICU setting 2 but to date there does not seem to be a general awareness of this phenomonen. 5-oxoproline is an amino acid derivative within the γ-glutamyl cycle within the liver, When gluathione stores are depleted γ-glutamycycteine synthase activity increases in an attempt to replenish the glutathione stores. However in the process excess glutamylcycteine is produced which is then converted into 5-oxoproline which can accumulate and cause a metabolic acidosis. We present a case series of unexplained high anion gap metabolic acidoses in ICU associated with an acculumation of 5-oxoproline. These patients had a background history of alcohol abuse and/or malnutrition and had received paracetamol 4 g/day over periods of 2-3 weeks in ICU. Urinary 5-oxoproline levels were tested and were found to be abnormally high. In all these cases cessation of the paracetamol resulted in correction of the acidosis. It is likely that a combination of predisposing factors and prolonged paracetamol treatment resulted in depletion of glutathione stores in these patients. ICU patients may have risk factors for depletion of glutathione stores. Prolonged use of paracetamol in these patients can further deplete gluathione and introduce the risk of developing metabolic acidosis due to 5-oxoproline.

The Levelling Effect of Product Market Competition on Gender Wage Discrimination

Using linked employer-employee panel data for West Germany that include direct information on the competition faced by plants, we investigate the effect of product market competition on the gender pay gap. Controlling for match fixed effects we find that intensified competition significantly lowers the unexplained gap in plants with neither collective agreements nor a works council. Conversely, there is no effect in plants with these types of worker codetermination, which are unlikely to have enough discretion to adjust wages in the short run. We also document a larger competition effect in plants with few females in their workforces. Our findings are in line with Beckerian taste-based employer wage discrimination that is limited by competitive forces.