Re-examining Gender Earning Differentials in Malaysian Manufacturing

The manufacturing sector is a major avenue for female employment in the urban labor market in Malaysia. Only two studies, both published more than two decades ago, have examined gender earning differentials in this sector. Since then, the percentage of women being educated has increased, along with their participation rate, and several laws protecting their rights have also been passed, making it timely to re-examine the earnings gap. We do this by drawing on more recent data from a larger representative survey of manufacturing employees. The Blinder-Oaxaca technique, utilized in the previous two studies, was used to estimate the existing earnings gap and to decompose it to differences attributable to endowments, coefficients (traditionally viewed as subsuming discrimination), and the interaction between the two. We found a smaller gap than previously reported, with better female endowments helping to narrow the gap, and unexplained differences in coefficients being responsible for the remaining gap. The interaction effect was not statistically significant. Contrary to the earlier studies, the differential treatment of women in the manufacturing sector, rather than endowment differences, is hampering the equalization of earnings. This calls for newer approaches to closing the earnings gap.

Gender Pay Gap Among Urban-Urban Migrant Workers: Pakistan's Two-Tier Urban Labor Market

Urban-urban migration has socio-economic and demographic consequences on the labor markets. It affects job mobility and gender-balance in the urban workplace. This study analyzes the gender wage gap among urban-urban migrant workers in Pakistan. The study used the most recent Labour Force Survey, a nationally representative dataset, to identify the determinants of wages for male and female migrant workers separately. The wages of urban-urban female migrants tend to be 45% lower than their male counterparts. The results indicated disparities in working hours and human capital endowment as some of the contributing factors to the increasing gender wage gap. This research calls for implementing drastic measures, i.e., gender-insensitive capacity building of urban migrant workers, workplace incentives for women, and enhancement of women leadership roles, to reduce gender inequalities in the urban labor market.

An urban labor market with frictional housing markets: theory and an application to the Paris urban area

We build a tractable model of frictional labor markets and segmented housing markets to study welfare effects of regulations, including spatial misallocation and deviation from competitive pricing of rents. The model is summarized by a labor demand curve depending on rents and wages, a wage curve reflecting labor market tightness and rents, and finally a rent curve reflecting employment. In this economy, the rent gradient in the flexible rent sector is higher than in a purely competitive housing market. This leads to spatial misallocation due to some employees commuting too much and some non-employed living inefficiently close to jobs. In turn, reducing generalized commuting costs reduces the rent gradient in the flexible rent sector and the cost of spatial misallocation of workers. The reduction in market rents is maximal when labor markets are less frictional and housing markets are more frictional, and welfare gains are larger when both are more efficient.

Unequal occupational mobilities between rural migrant and urban resident workers in urban China

The current scholarship on inequality of occupational attainment between rural migrant workers (RMW) and urban resident workers (URW) is largely dominated by evidence suggesting a landscape of occupational segregation, whilst there is a lack of studies researching the equality of occupational mobility. To fill this gap, this study compares the occupational mobilities between RMW and URW in China’s urban labor market. Three heatmaps are used to visualize the differences between these two groups in the outflow distributions of occupational mobility. The results show a marked disadvantage of RMW’s mobility into white-collar occupations and a relatively high tendency for them to move to or to stay in the manual and agricultural occupations.

Racial/Ethnic Hierarchy and Urban Labor Market Inequality: Four Poignant Historical Cases

The sociological literature, although rich on the topic of racial/ethnic hierarchy, often overlooks its spatially varying nature relative to group tensions and inequality. In this article, we address this gap by drawing on and analyzing four historically important U.S. urban cases (i.e., Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City) that reflect both compositional diversity and significant variation in racial/ethnic group sizes. Our analyses, which draw on U.S. Census microdata and content–coded newspaper reports (1910–1930), demonstrate considerable consistency in racial/ethnic labor market hierarchies, yet divergences in levels of labor market inequality. Specifically, our aggregate analyses and cross–city comparisons of sectoral representations and occupational returns reveal the importance of place–specific processes—processes consistent with what spatially sensitive queuing perspectives suggest about the bolstering of minority prospects in contexts where subordinated groups come to numerically dominate. As suggested by competition/threat perspectives, however, such gains from queuing are undermined at least to some extent by city–specific racial/ethnic antagonisms, industry–level segregation, and group closure. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for various streams of research on group inequality, labor market hierarchies, and spatial understandings of how they unfold across urban spaces.