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Elite occupations are characterised by the magnitude of income accumulation which has been particularly exacerbated in the financialisation process. This paper however shows that the cumulative effects on group earnings is a pattern visible across the labour force. The case studies on the US and UK labour force in the financialisation era in effect show that elitist earnings are a group phenomenon for a dominant group, mainly white male or female, at the expense of other racial, ethnic, and gender groups. Learning from such group behaviour on financial accumulation and drawing on Sen’s rules of legitimacy (1981) in market interactions, the discussion then looks at the possibility of “sustainable earning” trends that feed into the financial needs for the green transition. The paper concludes that economic actors should be aware of the group legitimacy to financial flows, but that the group boundaries should be based on ecological-based entitlements rather than social-based entitlements to financial flows.

Many governments encourage migrants to participate in volunteer activities as a stepping stone to labour market integration. In the present study, we investigate whether this prosocial engagement lowers the hiring discrimination against them. To this end, we use unique data from a field experiment in which fictitious job applications are sent in response to real vacancies in Belgium. Ethnic origin and volunteer activities are randomly assigned to these applications. While non-volunteering native candidates receive more than twice as many job interview invitations as non‐volunteering migrants, no unequal treatment is found between natives and migrants when they reveal volunteer activities.

We investigate whether, why and when prosocial engagement has a causal effect on individual employment opportunities. To this end, a field experiment is conducted in which volunteering activities are randomly assigned to fictitious job applications sent to genuine vacancies. We find that volunteers get one third more interview invitations than non‐volunteers. The volunteering premium is higher for females but invariant with respect to the number of engagements and the private versus public or nonprofit orientation of the job posting firm. As a result, our findings are consistent with the idea that prosocial workers sort themselves into non‐commercial sectors.

Based upon unique survey data collected using respondent driven sampling methods, we investigate whether there is a gender pay gap among social entrepreneurs in the UK. We find that women as social entrepreneurs earn 29% less than their male colleagues, above the average UK gender pay gap of 19%. We estimate the adjusted pay gap to be about 23% after controlling for a range of demographic, human capital and job characteristics, as well as personal preferences and values. These differences are hard to explain by discrimination since these CEOs set their own pay. Income may not be the only aim in an entrepreneurial career, so we also look at job satisfaction to proxy for non-monetary returns. We find female social entrepreneurs to be more satisfied with their job as a CEO of a social enterprise than their male counterparts. This result holds even when we control for the salary generated through the social enterprise. Our results extend research in labour economics on the gender pay gap as well as entrepreneurship research on women's entrepreneurship to the novel context of social enterprise. It provides the first evidence for a "contented female social entrepreneur" paradox.