who provided me with very useful feedback on this thesis. I also wish to thank my committee members, Professors Randy Hodson and Andrew Martin whose advice and support I greatly appreciate. I thank especially Michael Nau, who has provided me with a tremendous amount of guidance and suggestions in my work and highly useful information on the workings of financial capitalism. Above all, I wish to thank my advisor, Professor Tim Bartley. I am sincerely grateful for his encouragement, resources, trenchant advice, and invaluable suggestions, all of which have sharpened this paper as well as my own thinking. v Vita

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.

American families have become less economically secure in recent decades, and this process accelerated during the 2008 financial crisis and its immediate aftermath. This study investigates how the crisis apportioned income precarity among families compared to pre-crisis years. We use the Survey of Consumer Finances and find that working families suffered the preponderance of income losses from the crisis, although the crisis shifted income losses towards more privileged working families. In fact, middle-income working families now have the same level of income precarity as the working poor, and families in the top income quintile continue to have elevated precarity levels. This result indicates that the middle class continues to bear a growing share of economic risk and that all working families are experiencing heightened insecurity in the post-crisis era.

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