Pay inequality stems both from differences in workers’ individual characteristics and firm pay setting. Some firms capture more value or pass on a larger share of surplus to workers. Yet, intergenerational mobility research focuses on transmission of individual traits, neglecting how firms shape the inheritance of inequality. We use three decades of Swedish administrative data to decompose the intergenerational earnings correlation into firm pay premiums and worker effects. One quarter of the intergenerational earnings correlation at midlife is explained by sorting between firms with unequal pay. Employer inheritance accounts for a small share of this firm-based earnings transmission. Instead, high-education and high-occupation workers disproportionately work at high-paying firms. Parental referral networks and the inheritance of industry and labor market context play a supplementary role. As workers with high-education or high-status jobs increasingly benefit from high-paying firms, firm premiums constitute a central mechanism through which collective processes drive intergenerational earnings transmission.

Tech firms are under strong pressure to increase their demographic diversity. While activists and scholars have tended to treat the sector as homogenously hostile to women and racialized minorities, recent theory on organizational inequalities stresses heterogeneity in firm-level inequality regimes. Beginning with an inductive exploration of variation in executive, managerial, and professional workforce trajectories, we find that between 2008 and 2016 most Tech firms show little change, but that there are also significant clusters of firms that were becoming either much more or much less diverse for all three occupational levels. We model these trajectories as a function of firm visibility, the regulation of federal contractors by the U.S. Department of Labor, and leadership composition. Multinomial logistic regression models show that firms with an increasing (decreasing) diversity pattern in managerial and executive positions are also more likely to become more (less) diverse in their much more numerous professional jobs. Managers are more influential than executive in this regard. Regulatory pressure is associated with increased executive diversity trajectories, but not with managerial or professional trajectories. We conclude that increased Tech diversity is possible but requires leadership, particularly at the middle manager level. In addition, regulatory and visibility pressures primarily produce symbolic shuffles in top jobs.

This study presents the first large-scale analysis of the role of unions in how technological change impacts transitions to new employment following job loss. The authors use large-scale matched employer–employee data from the Netherlands for the period 2001–2016 to assess how technology implementation within enterprises impacts the job search duration among workers whose job ended during the implementation period. The authors study to what degree industry unionization moderates this impact. They find job searches to be significantly longer in enterprises implementing new technologies, but industries with stronger unions exhibit a weaker association between technology implementation and job search duration. The results suggest unions enhance training, and re-education, and facilitate work-to-work transitions, increasing the employability of workers under technological change.

This article aims to explain why inequality in fringe benefits has grown faster than wage inequality over the past four decades. We depart from previous income inequality research by studying benefits in addition to wages, but also by focusing on workplaces as the main drivers of benefit determination. We advance the argument that benefits determination is more organizationally embedded than wages mainly because workplaces have greater ability and incentive to alter benefits. Consequently, workplace compensation practices, including type of employment relations, are more important for benefits than for wages. Longitudinal linked employer–job administrative data on wages and voluntary benefits costs from the Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) allow us to test these arguments, as well as examine why benefit inequality has dramatically increased. Results from variance decomposition reveal that between- and within-establishment inequality is higher in benefits than in wages, indicating that workplaces affect benefits more than wages. Regression results show that, as expected, establishment-level pay-settings affect benefits more than wages, and the decline in labor unions along with the liberalization of employment practices partly account for why benefit inequality increased at more than twice the rate of wage inequality.

Why are some workers employed in some workplaces more likely to acquire valued rewards in the form of employer-provided benefits? In this paper, I shed new light on the sources of benefits inequality by developing a structural, rent-based theory as a strategy for observing and explaining within- and between-workplace benefits inequality. I put forward rent extraction by powerful workers as a main causal mechanism that produces within-workplace variation; and workplaces’ rent-sharing, attributable to firms with considerable resources and formalized organizations, as a mechanism that generates between-workplace variation. I test this theoretical model and the “linkedness” of the two mechanisms by analyzing Israeli matched employer-employee register data. I find that workers with greater bargaining power for rent extraction (i.e., full-time full-year (FTFY), service-class occupations) are more likely to obtain valued benefits within workplaces. Also large-scale, large-size firms and formalized workplaces (i.e., state-owned and public organizations and older organizations) are more likely to share their rent by providing valued benefits to all their workers, FTFY workers and service-class employees in particular. I conclude that benefits exacerbate the disparities arising from wages—except for women, who have higher odds of obtaining valued benefits than comparable men; implicitly, women have an unmeasured preference for benefits.

This study explores the implications of flexible management practices for organizational wage gaps. It argues that the implementation of high-performance and non-standard employment practices is not only skill but also class-biased, favouring workers in supervisory positions. This argument is examined using matched employer–employee data from the 2011 British Workplace Employment Relations Study (WERS) survey, which uniquely includes detailed information on flexible management practices. Findings from fixed-effects models support the argument. Wage gaps are more pronounced between supervisors and rank-and-file workers in organizations implementing high-performance or non-standard employment practices, compared to those without such practices. Notably, heightened education-based wage gaps are observed in organizations adopting only non-standard practices. The results suggest that purportedly efficiency-oriented changes in organizational practices are not wage-neutral but tend to favour already well-compensated workers.

It is widely believed that meritocratic employment practices reduce gender inequality by limiting managers’ reliance on nonmerit factors, such as biases. An emerging stream of research, however, questions the belief, arguing that meritocratic practices often fail to reduce inequality and may paradoxically increase it. Despite these opposing predictions, we still lack convincing empirical findings to adjudicate between them. Typically relying on data from a single organization or industry, most previous studies suffer from limited generalizability and cannot properly account for the large variation in the implementation of merit-based reward systems across organizations, let alone identify the origins of the variation. We attempt to overcome the limitations by constructing large-scale linked employer–employee data and by investigating the impact of merit-based systems on different components of compensation. Analyzing our panel data on 400 large Japanese companies and 400,000 employees of these companies over 12 years, we found evidence in support of the meritocracy paradox. The gender gap in bonus pay was greater, not smaller, in workplaces with a merit-based system compared to workplaces without it. But this paradoxical expansion of the gender gap was observed only in bonus pay but not in total compensation. We further found that a transition to merit-based systems has varying impacts on different employee groups; it widened the gender pay gap for young workers but reduced the gap for managers. Our research contributes to understanding gender inequality in times of shifting employment relations and the rise of meritocracy.

This study examines how technology implementation within workplaces impacts job ending among employees. We advance the literature on the labor market consequences of new technologies by focusing on their impact within workplaces where they are implemented, rather than inferring from aggregate labor structural changes. We also address how the impact of technology differs depending on workers education, organizational tenure and age. Using large-scale Dutch matched employer-employee panel data directly measuring technology implementation, we find that technology implementation is associated with an overall decrease in the probability of job ending. In line with the skill biased technological change hypothesis, higher educational attainment is associated with lower probabilities of job ending. Furthermore, we find older workers (around 50+) and workers with longer organizational tenure (around 12+ years) to have a higher probability of job ending when technology is implemented. Finally, we do not find the effects of technology implementation to differ depending on the union density of the industry in which an enterprise operates.

This paper examines the role of first managerial experiences in shaping women top executives’ impact on workplace gender equality. Connecting literature on change agency with career imprinting, we present novel theorizing on how the representation and power of women in leadership experienced in the first managerial role shape women leaders’ impact on differences in outcomes between men and women. We used longitudinal register panel data on employee wages and linked them to the executive careers of the directors of Dutch organizations between 2006 and 2019. Fixed-effects panel regression analyses demonstrated that women executives exposed to same-gender peers in directorate boards and a woman CEO during their first executive role are more likely to become agents of change by furthering women employees’ wage progression and chances of receiving a permanent contract. Our study enriches the agents of change literature by drawing attention to the influence of early career experiences on women leaders’ impact on gender equality in workplaces.