The authors are equally responsible for the present article. We thank our colleagues at the Swedish Institute for Social Research and the Department of Sociology for helpful comments and suggestions. Especially, we would like to thank Per Bavner,

In this paper, it is argued that women's limited access to organizational power structures is a constituent part of the explanation of gender wage inequality. Multi-level analyses conducted on a comprehensive Swedish data set combining information on a large number of private sector employers and all their employees confirm that establishments' gender wage gaps are wider the stronger the male representation among organizational decision-makers, net of individuals' human capital and various organizational features relevant for wage setting. Theoretical explanations focus on gender unequal outcomes of i) general rules and policies decided at higher organizational levels, and ii) everyday decision-making and daily interaction between superiors and their subordinates. On basis of the empirical results, we conclude that gender wage inequality is to a substantial degree driven by everyday decision-making in organizations. It seems as if close supervisors' decisions and suggestions about wage rates, promotions, internal training et cetera are to some extent based on personal preferences, l oyalties, and contacts that are not gender neutral.

Theoretical explanations suggest that wage differentials between immigrant and native workers are generated either by unequal acquisition of human capital between the groups or by various forms of exclusion of immigrants from fair labor market rewards. We evaluate the labor quality and labor market discrimination hypotheses by using a large sample of Swedish employees in 1995. Our findings show that labor market integration is relatively unproblematic for immigrants from Western countries, whereas immigrants from other countries, especially from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, face substantial obstacles to earnings progress when entering the Swedish labor market. For the latter group of countries, extensive controls for general and country-specific human capital reduce the earnings differentials. However, the remaining gap is of a non-trivial magnitude. Thus, the labor quality hypothesis accounts for a part of the observed nativeimmigrant wage gap, but the remaining differentials can be interpreted in terms of labor market discrimination. ___________________________________________________________________ ________We gratefully acknowledge valuable comments from Mia Hultin, Lena Schröder, Michael Tåhlin and Roger Vilhelmsson. This work was supported by grants from RALF and SFR.2

We ask whether growing up with persons of the same national background (which we refer to as coethnics), in the immediate neighbourhood, influences future educational careers of children of immigrants. We use administrative data to follow an entire cohort of immigrant children who graduated from Swedish compulsory schools in 1995. We have information on their parents and on their ethnic environment during the period they were 10 -15 years old. The dependent variable studied is the highest completed education in years at age 24. We are able to account for unobserved heterogeneity with neighbourhood fixed effects and ethnic group fixed effects. We find that the effect of the quantitative side of the ethnic environment (the number of coethnics) on educational attainment is strongly conditioned by the qualitative side of this environment (the educational success of coethnics). The individual's educational career is positively related to the number of young coethnics in the neighbourhood, but only if they can be characterized as being educationally successful. Growing up in a large ethnic community with average or poor educational success is harmful for the future educational success. The effect of the ethnic surrounding on the highest completed education is fully mediated by success in compulsory school.3

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