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This paper studies how changes in the statutory minimum wage have affected the wage distribution in Estonia, a post-transition country with little collective bargaining and relatively large wage inequality. The analyses show that the minimum wage has had substantial spill-over effects on wages in the lower tail of the distribution; the effects are most pronounced up to the 20 th percentile and then decline markedly. The minimum wage has contributed to lower wage inequality and this has particularly benefitted lowwage segments of the labour market such as women and the elderly. Interestingly, the importance of the minimum wage for the wage distribution was smaller during the global financial crisis than before or after the crisis.

This paper studies the gender gap in net wealth. We use administrative data on wealth that are linked to the Estonian Household Finance and Consumption Survey, which provides individual-level wealth data for all household types. The unconditional gender gap in mean wealth is 45%, but this sizeable gap in means originates mainly from the top tail of the distribution, where men have much more wealth than women, while the gender differences in wealth are statistically insignificant in most of the lower wealth quintiles. At the top of the distribution the differences in wealth can be explained by larger self-employment activity of men. Men have more business wealth than women do, and the gender wealth gap is the largest for this asset class. The gender wealth gaps across different household types are very heterogeneous. The unconditional gaps in wealth are strongly in favour of men throughout most of the wealth distribution for married couples. For single-member households, on the other hand, the raw gaps are in favour of women in the lower half of the wealth distribution. These raw gaps in opposite directions can mostly be explained by differences in the observed characteristics of men and women among married couples vs single people.

This paper will study gender differences in wage bargaining by comparing the unexplained wage gap in desired, realised and reservation wages. The notion of desired wages shows workers' first bet to potential employers during the job-search process. It is found that: (1) The unexplained gender wage gap is around 20% in desired and realised wages, which supports the view that gender income gap in expectations compares well with realised income gap. (2) The unexplained gender wage gap is larger in desired wages than in reservation wages for unemployed individuals that can be related to women's higher disutility from unemployment. (3) Occupational and sectoral mobility cannot explain a significant additional part of the gender wage gap.

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