Bianca Buligescu joined UNU-MERIT as a researcher in 2011. Her PhD investigates the impact of maternal leave on mothers’ wages in Germany, the impact of subsidized employment on wages and tenure in Italy, and the impact of occupational crowding on the gender pay gap in seven European Union countries. She is currently working on the INNO METRICS and INNO GRIPS projects. She has previously done commissioned work for EUROSTAT and UNICEF.
Educational background
- July 2005 MA Social Policy Analysis
Universiteit Leuven, CEPS/INSTEAD Grand Duchy of Luxembourg - July 2004 BA Political Science
National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Romania
Research title:
Career interruptions and wage gaps
Main research question:
What is the effect of maternal leave/ occupational segregation/ subsidized employment on wages?
Abstract:
This dissertation investigates the effects of career interruption on wages in three empirical papers. The first article focuses with the impact of maternal leave on mothers wages. We apply recent panel data methods designed to address problems of sample selectivity, unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity to German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) data. Our estimates imply a wage penalty due to maternal leave which although substantial remains below previous estimates. Furthermore, we find that this penalty is less persistent than other studies suggest. Five years after the career interruption mothers seem to have caught up. The second article focuses whether there are penalties for femaleness of an occupation. Using the European Structure of Earnings 2006, we find that the relationship between the proportion of female in an occupation and occupational average wages for men and women is non-linear. Further the results show that for men being employed in a female occupation yields the lowest returns whereas for women being employed in a mixed occupation has the lowest returns. Our results show that contrary to expectations the gender pay gap seems to be driven by mixed occupations suggesting that once occupational characteristics are fully controlled for promotion mechanisms in mixed occupations could be detrimental to women. The focus of the third paper is on the extent to which mobility allowance improves the matching process or acts as a disincentive effect for displaced workers. While previous papers focus on the effect of an additional year of eligibility on re-employment probabilities, this paper focuses on tenure in a new job and compares the tenure of people with mobility allowance with people in the program without mobility allowance. A matching procedure is applied to ensure the two groups are comparable.
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