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The gender wage gap (GWG) is what undermines the utopia of the XXI century: a society that ensures gender equality of opportunities. Given the negative economic consequences experienced after the pandemic Covid-19, now more than ever the policymaker needs to unravel the puzzle behind the existence of GWG and implement effective gender-sensitive recovery policies to finally address this form of inequality. This thesis presents three independent empirical studies that aim to uncover the major drivers of the GWG relying on a human capital approach while exploiting differences in human capital investment (vocational versus general education). After demonstrating the existence of a differential life-cycle effect of education types on age-wage profiles, Chapter 2 uncovers a straightforward relationship between gender differences in the age-wage profile, educational background and a country's educational system. Chapter 3 explores the event of parenthood as another important trigger of GWG and unpacks gender heterogeneities in terms of parenthood wage effects. It then takes a step further and explores any relation between the motherhood wage gap and educational background. Results provide strong evidence that vocational-background women face a higher motherhood wage gap since vocational skills are less transferable, less adaptable and depreciate quicker if compared to skills acquired via a general path. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on gender occupational segregation and the impact of the glass ceiling effect on women's relative wage distribution. The chapter investigates how the GWG varies over the wage distribution across education (vocational versus general) and occupation types, defined according to variation in the degree of female participation in each occupation type. Findings show that gender segregation affects the GWG over the wage distribution with women with vocational qualifications facing a tougher glass ceiling in male-dominated and mixed occupations and women with a general background having their weakest glass ceiling effect in male-dominated occupations.

This thesis comprises three empirical studies that explore contemporary topics within the area of social mobility. I investigate the mechanisms that contribute to the perpetuation of inequalities in the UK. In the first empirical chapter, I examine the degree of intergenerational income mobility in the UK. Using new data from the harmonised British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and Understanding Society (UKHLS) datasets for cohorts born between 1973 and 1992, I find evidence of substantial intergenerational persistence in the transmission of resources at the household level. I propose a novel methodology to estimate income mobility. The two-stage residual approach provides improved measures of long-run income for both generations. The intergenerational elasticities indicate that around one quarter of every additional percentage of income advantage enjoyed by parents is passed on to their children. The percentile rank coefficients, a measure of positional mobility, corroborate these findings. An increase of 10 points in the rank distribution of parents relates to an improvement of around 3 points in the ranks of their children. The strength of this association is an important indicator of how family background influences living standards in adulthood. My results are robust to changes in the specifications of the model, sample restrictions and to the use of alternative measures of income. In the second empirical chapter, I unpack heterogeneities in intergenerational income mobility by three key dimensions, and present new facts about income mobility in the UK. First, I examine income mobility by gender, and I find that it is similar for sons and daughters. There is assortative mating by income, which reinforces the dynamics of income persistence due to family background. Second, I investigate variations in income mobility across the income distribution. Mobility is lower in the tails of the distribution of parental income. However, estimators of rank directional mobility reveal small rank movements even in these tails. Third, I explore geographical variations in absolute and relative mobility by region of upbringing. There are stark differences across the UK, regions in the North of England display substantially lower levels of both relative and absolute income mobility than in the South. This chapter demonstrates the importance of considering these heterogeneities and of looking beyond aggregate measures that reflect average income mobility. The final empirical chapter provides new insights on the role of expectations of facing future labour market discrimination on the educational achievement of ethnic minority pupils. Using unique data on discriminatory expectations from Next Steps for a cohort of students born in 1989-1990, I find that ethnic minority pupils who anticipate discrimination on ethnic grounds achieve better results in their GCSE exams at age 16. The evidence is consistent with the idea that discrimination can endogenously influence human capital investment decisions even prior to labour market entry. Variations in the magnitude and sign of this association indicate that there are heterogeneous effects across ethnic groups, with some groups showing greater effort in attempting to counteract the ethnic penalty that they expect to face in the labour market. Taken together, the results presented in this thesis show that opportunities for social mobility in the UK are unevenly distributed across society. The implications drawn from this research provide valuable insights that need to be taken into consideration when planning policies to equalise opportunities.

This thesis is an econometric investigation of wage inequality in the UK. It consists of three pieces of empirical work using large UK micro-datasets. The datasets used include the individual level New Earnings Survey (NES), Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), and the Labour Force Survey (LFS). Use is also made of firm level data from the Annual Respondents Database (ARD). The first piece of empirical work aims to identify trends in the UK wage distribution over time at the aggregate level and at the level of population sub-groups. This analysis is performed by fitting parametric distributions to annual cross sections of data using maximum likelihood estimation. The second piece of analysis is an investigation into the driving factors behind the change in the distribution of wages over this period using the LFS. This is analysed using a human capital framework and a decomposition analysis, dividing changes in wage inequality into price, quantity, and residual effects. The final empirical investigation contributes to the literature investigating the relationship between wage inequality and firm performance. Using matched employer/employee data, a Cobb-Douglas production function with a wage inequality term is used to estimate the relationship between the performance of enterprises and wage inequality. Overall, the findings in this thesis show that the finance sector stands out sharply in the UK as a high inequality industry both in levels and in growth. Despite a slow-down compared to the 1980’s, wage inequality has continued to grow. Human capital effects have played a role in the changes in wage inequality but a more sophisticated model is needed to more fully explain these changes at the within-group level. There is only weak evidence of a link between inequality and corporate performance overall. Results for manufacturing are, however, consistent with earlier work.

Despite repeated commitments to promote gender equality in the United Na- tions and elsewhere, women are still not as favoured as men in many dimensions, including the labour market. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the changing female relative labour market outcomes. This thesis is made up of three empirical studies. The first empirical study describes and analyses the impact on the inter- national gender wage differentials, measured at the mean, of globalisation and the development of social openness, and how such impact has been changing over time across different income and development levels and across different cultural back- grounds. The objective of the second empirical study is to understand the variation in the gender differential in employment in Japan, and investigate the relationship between such variation and the development of technology. The third empirical study determines the evolution of the UK gender gap at the top end of the wage distribution in relation to different labour market sectors, occupations, and different cohort groups, both within cohorts over their work lives, and across cohorts. The results indicate that the effect on gender wage differentials of the develop- ment of the economy and technology vary across different regions and skill levels of workers. Having higher human capital accumulation or working in higher level jobs is not always positively associated with good female labour market outcomes. More stringent policy enforcement benefits the majority of women in terms of wages, but such effects are found to be relatively weak for the women at the top decile of the female wage distribution and more recent generations. Societal constraints do not only limit female progress in the labour market but also the positive impact of female politicians.