As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to the public talk Female Wages, Work Experience and Training over the Life-Cycle (joint work with Monica Costa-Dias, David Goll and Costas Meghir) given by Sir Richard Blundell, Professor of Economics at UCL.

Sir Richard Blundell holds the David Ricardo Chair of Political Economy at University College London where he was appointed Professor of Economics in 1984, and was Chair of the Department 1988 - 1992. He is a graduate of the University of Bristol and London School of Economics. He was awarded a Knighthood in the 2014 New Year Honours list for his services to Economics and Social Science. He was awarded a CBE in 2006. Since 1986 he has been Research Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), where he is also Director of the  ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy.

Abstract: This paper aims to understand why wages for the lower educated show slower growth over the life-cycle relative to those for the higher educated. We focus on female wages and explore how human capital investments (and children) impact on female earnings and to what extent they explain the gender gap.  Using household panel data from the UK we combine reduced form evidence with a structural microeconometric model of wages, training, and labour supply. We use this framework to examine how allowing for human capital changes the way we evaluate (and design) welfare-to-work and tax-credit policies, especially those policies designed to encourage mothers into work. We find that the returns to work experience display strong dynamic complementarity with education, with lower returns to experience for the low educated and for those in part-time work. We show that work experience and the part-time penalty explain a large part of the gender gap in wages, especially for more educated women. We also uncover a role for training to offset human capital depreciation from part-time work and non-employment for women with children.

Venue: S4, Petal 2 (Maison de la Paix)

The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar is our Departmental weekly seminar, featuring external speakers in all areas of economics. The organizer for this academic year is Prof. Julia Cajal-Grossi (julia.cajal@graduateinstitute.ch)