Essays on labour demand and wage formation

The first essay in this thesis is on gender wage differentials among manufacturing sector white-collar workers. The wage differential is decomposed into firm, job (within-firm) and individual-level components. Job-level gender segregation explains over half of the gap, while firm-level segregation is not important. After controlling for firm, job and individual characteristics, the remaining unexplained wage cap to the advantage of men is six per cent of men's mean wage. In the second essay, I study how the business cycle and gender affect the distribution of the earnings losses of displaced workers. The negative effect of displacement is large, persistent and strongest in the lowest earnings deciles. The effect is larger in a recession than in a recovery period, and in all periods women's earnings drop more than men's earnings. The third essay shows that the transition from steady employment to disability pension depends on the stringency of medical screening and the degree of experience-rating of pension costs applied to the employer. The fact that firms have to bear part of the cost of employees' disability pension costs lowers both the incidence of long sick leave periods and the probability that sick leave ends in a disability pension. The fourth and fifth essays are studies on the employment, wage and profit effects of a regional payroll tax cut experiment conducted in northern and eastern Finland. The results show no statistically significant effect on any of the response variables.