It is well documented that earnings inequalities have risen in many high-income countries. Less clear are the linkages between rising income inequality and workplace dynamics, how within- and between-workplace inequality varies across countries, and to what extent these inequalities are moderated by national labor market institutions. In order to describe changes in the initial between- and within-firm market income distribution we analyze administrative records for 2,000,000,000+ job years nested within 50,000,000+ workplace years for 14 high-income countries in North America, Scandinavia, Continental and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. We find that countries vary a great deal in their levels and trends in earnings inequality but that the between-workplace share of wage inequality is growing in almost all countries examined and is in no country declining. We also find that earnings inequalities and the share of between-workplace inequalities are lower and grew less strongly in countries with stronger institutional employment protections and rose faster when these labor market protections weakened. Our findings suggest that firm-level restructuring and increasing wage inequalities between workplaces are more central contributors to rising income inequality than previously recognized.

This study examines whether organizations with significant pay gaps along one dimension (gender, migration status, class, etc.) tend to exhibit similarly high inequalities along other dimensions, or whether there is a trade-off between inequality dimensions. Using French administrative data, it estimates correlations between class, gender and migrant workplace earnings gaps, and studies how these gaps also relate to a fourth measure of intra-categorical inequality. To ensure robust results, this article introduces innovative methods to address measurement biases that may distort the relationship between earnings gaps. It establishes three key patterns. First, the gender gap is higher in more unequal workplaces. Second, the migrant gap is higher in more equal workplaces. Third, gender and migrant earnings gaps are negatively correlated within workplaces. These results suggest that workplace inequality regimes are shaped by both reinforcing and trade-off dynamics. Finally, this article explores factors influencing these patterns and highlights the role of industries.

Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the authors estimate the evolving isolation of higher earners from other employees in 12 countries: Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, South Korea, and Sweden. They find in almost all countries a growing workplace isolation of top earners and dramatically declining exposure of top earners to bottom earners. The authors perform a first exploration of the main factors accounting for this trend: deindustrialization, workplace downsizing, restructuring (including layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, and subcontracting), and digitalization contribute substantially to the increase in top earner segregation. These findings open up a future research agenda on the causes and consequences of top earner segregation.

The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer–employee-linked data from 1990 to 2019 for 12 countries and data from bank reports, from 2009 to 2017 in 13 European countries. We find a strong asymmetry in the effect of upswings and downswings in finance on earnings inequality, a weak, if any, mitigating effect of capital requirements on finance’s contribution to inequality, and a restructuring but no absolute effect of the bonus cap on financiers’ earnings. We suggest that while rising financiers’ wages increase inequality in upswings, they are resilient in downswings and thus downswings do not contribute to a symmetric decline in inequality.

Immigrants to high-income countries often face considerable and persistent difficulties in the labour market, whereas their native-born children typically experience economic progress. However, little is known about the extent to which these immigrant–native earnings differences stem from unequal pay when doing the same work for the same employer versus labour market processes that sort immigrants into lower-paid jobs. Here, using data from nine European and North American countries, we show that the segregation of workers with immigrant backgrounds into lower-paying jobs accounts for about three-quarters of overall immigrant–native earnings differences. Although within-job pay inequality remains notable for immigrants in several countries, our results demonstrate that unequal access to higher-paying jobs is the primary driver of the immigrant–native pay gap across a range of institutionally and demographically diverse contexts. These findings highlight the importance of policies aimed at reducing between-job segregation, such as language training, job training, job search assistance programmes, improving access to domestic education, recognizing foreign qualifications, and settlement programmes aimed at enhancing access to job-relevant information and networks. Policies that target employer bias in hiring and promotion decisions are also likely to be effective, whereas measures aimed at ensuring equal pay for equal work may have more limited scope for further progress in closing the immigrant–native pay gap^‍.

Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of countries. Here, using recent linked employer–employee data from 15 countries, we show that the processes sorting people into different jobs account for substantially less of the gender pay differences than was previously believed and that within-job pay differences remain consequential.

Workplaces have become more unstable in recent decades, but how such instability shapes categorical inequalities remains little understood. This study explores how the rise of employment precarity, re-conceptualized as an attribute of workplaces, affects gender inequality. We argue that gender inequality increases in volatile workplaces where employee tenure is short and turnover is common. In such workplaces, gender stereotyping and opportunity hoarding by men may become prevalent, because members have little incentive to acquire individualized information about each other and those who are not satisfied with unequal distribution of rewards simply leave rather than raising their voice. To test our argument, we analyze the effect of workplace volatility on the gender-wage gap, using employer–employee linked data from two separate national contexts: South Korea and the Netherlands. Leveraging on the different institutional contexts of the two countries, we also examine the moderating roles of unionization and public sector employment. Our theory and empirical findings contribute to our understanding of the workplace-level mechanisms of inequality, especially in the context of recent structural changes in the labor market.

Using a unique sample of 5,022 workers in 94 large German workplaces, the authors explore whether and how women’s access to higher level positions, firms’ human resources practices, and workers’ qualification levels are associated with gender differences in earnings. First, they find that having more women in management reduces the gender earnings gap for jobs with low qualifications, but not those with high qualifications. Second, they find that while men’s compensation is positively affected by having a male supervisor, women with a female supervisor do not receive such an advantage. Finally, they find that human resources practices and job-level qualifications moderate the association between gendered power and gender earnings inequalities. Integrating women into managerial and supervisory roles does not automatically reduce gender inequalities; its impacts are contingent on organizational context.

What makes contacts at hiring organizations valuable for job seekers? Network-structural research emphasizes the importance of open networks for transmitting job leads, but studies of organizational networks show that closure helps employees influence decision-makers and increases group identification. We test the benefits of open and closed workplace networks for job seekers using administrative data on 72,173 hires in Denmark. Using networks of ex-coworker ties and job moves matched to plausible alternatives, we assess the utility of contacts’ workplace networks for hiring. Closure in the workplace networks of job seekers’ contacts increases the probability that job seekers will join contacts’ organizations by 51%. We go on to test three potential mechanisms. Closure helps contacts influence managers, who will in most cases have hiring authority, and integrates job seekers and their contacts into their workplace. We find no evidence that closed networks facilitate hiring by conveying complex information to employers and candidates.