The main goal of this study is twofold: (1) to provide a general overview of the contributions to the literature on the informal sector, with a special focus on the Public Choice approach; and (2) to compare these contributions across two institutionally different types of countries: developed and less developed (developing and transition) countries. The paper focuses on the criteria used to define the informal sector, the relationship between the formal and informal economy, tax evasion, and Public Choice analysis. It is stressed throughout this paper that the distinction between the two types of countries is of key importance.
We study whether gender influences credit attribution for group work using observational data and two experiments. We use data from academic economists to test whether coauthorship matters differently for tenure for men and women. We find that conditional on quality and other observables, men are tenured similarly regardless of whether they coauthor or solo-author. Women, however, are less likely to receive tenure the more they coauthor. We then conduct two experiments that demonstrate that biases in credit attribution in settings without confounds exist. Taken together, our results are best explained by gender and stereotypes influencing credit attribution for group work.
Sociological research on labor markets has focused most of its attention on the supply side of the labor market, that is, the characteristics of job seekers and job incumbents. Despite its pivotal and we believe primary role in labor market processes, the demand side, in particular the hiring decisions made by employers, has received less attention. The employment relationship, however, comprises both the demand and supply sides, as well as the matching processes that bring these together. We consider the sociology of the demand side by considering three sources of information (human, social, and cultural capital) that employers charged with making hiring decisions seek out, as well as the mechanisms associated with each source. We conceptualize employers as active agents whose hiring behavior is both constrained and enabled by larger social, organizational, and institutional contexts. We call for a program of research that will lead to a fuller empirical and theoretical understanding of employer hiring behavior and its place in the stratifying of labor markets.
The objective of this article is to study status-seeking, defined as pursuit for elevated social status, and how it relates to income inequality. Building on sociological, psychological, and economic literature, we formulate two opposing hypotheses suggesting a positive and a negative relationship between income inequality and status-seeking. To test these hypotheses, we use repeated crosssectional micro-data from the European Social Survey, which was collected biannually from 2002 to 2014, and use it in combination with income inequality data from Eurostat. With this data we complement existing studies by focusing on both between-and within-country overtime variability in income inequality and status-seeking. We find evidence of a negative relationship between income inequality and status-seeking. This supports the hypothesis that with higher levels of economic inequality people have less incentives and less motivation to strive for heightened social status.
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