We investigate the gender wage gap upon labor market entry among recent college graduates in Sweden and find a raw male-female wage gap of 12 percent. After adding controls for pre-labor market factors, only a gap of approximately 2.9 percent remains. Hence, pre-labor market factors, and especially the type of college major, explain the bulk of the initial gender wage gap, and there is little that can be attributed to employer discrimination. However, given the high minimum wages in the Swedish labor market discrimination may not be apparent in wages. Instead, employers may discriminate against women in hiring. Using data from a hiring experiment, we do not find any evidence of this. On the contrary, female job applicants tend to be preferred over male job applicants.

During the first ten years in the labor market, male university graduates experience a faster wage growth than their female counterparts in the Swedish labor market. This paper investigates the role of job mobility and upward occupational mobility in explaining the gender gap in early career wage growth. The analysis reveals that, although job and occupational mobility significantly contributes to the early career wage growth of both males and females, the size of the wage growth effect of both types of mobility are significantly lower for females. This female mobility penalty persists even after accounting for gender differences in observable individual and job characteristics as well as unobserved individual specific heterogeneity. We further investigate to what extent this mobility penalty of women is explained by parental status. We find that women’s penalty in returns to upward occupational mobility is largely linked to the timing of childbirth and child care, which suggests the presence of a trade-off between work and family. But women’s penalty in returns to “voluntary” job mobility does not seem to be mainly associated with parental status, in which a sizable gender gap in return to “voluntary” job mobility is found among the childless as well as parents.

A recent World Bank (2011) study has documented a rise in the mortality risk of girls relative to boys in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper investigates whether this disadvantage for girls in child mortality is a result of son bias in parents’ health investments in child nutrition (breastfeeding) and preventive medicine (vaccination) in a Sub-Saharan African country, Ethiopia. We also examine potential heterogeneity in son bias by distinguishing intended from unintended births. The latter implies that the mother had more children than she wanted, which may be a result of a lack of effective contraception or her husband’s desire for more sons. Using data from the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey, we find no gender bias in breastfeeding and vaccination of sons and daughters. A further examination of the results reveals that the treatment of boys and girls depends on whether the birth was intended. We find that intended boys and girls receive similar treatment in breastfeeding and vaccination. However, among unintended children, we find that girls receive significantly less breastfeeding and vaccinations than boys. Our finding implies that government policies designed to improve access to effective contraception and women’s bargaining power in the household are important to reducing unintended births and its consequences for girls’ well-being.

The question of whether and how living in a deprived neighborhood affects the labormarket outcomes of its residents has been a subject of great interest for both policy makers andresearchers. Despite this interest, empirical evidence of causal neighborhood effects on labormarket outcomes is scant, and causal evidence on the mechanisms involved is even more scant.The mechanism that this study investigates is neighborhood signaling effects. Specifically, weask whether there is unequal treatment in hiring depending on whether a job applicant signalsliving in a bad (deprived) neighborhood or in a good (affluent) neighborhood. To this end, weconducted a field experiment where fictitious job applications were sent to employers with anadvertised vacancy. Each job application was randomly assigned a residential address in either abad or a good neighborhood. The measured outcome is the fraction of invitations for a jobinterview (the callback rate). We find no evidence of general neighborhood signaling effects.However, job applicants with a foreign background have callback rates that are 42 percent lowerif they signal living in a bad neighborhood rather than in a good neighborhood. In addition, wefind that applicants with commuting times longer than 90 minutes have lower callback rates, andthis is unrelated to the neighborhood signaling effect. Apparently, employers view informationabout residential addresses as important for employment decisions.