Browsing by Subject "economics"

The gender wage gap is still prevalent despite increases in female educational attainment and employment rates in many countries. Recent research has studied how much of the gender wage gap is due to firm pay policies by estimating the difference in firm pay premiums that men and women receive from their employers. This is called the firm effects gap. This gap can be further decomposed into bargaining and sorting effects which measure how much of this gap in pay premiums is due to women receiving lower pay premiums than men working in the same firm (bargaining) and how much is due to women working in low-paying firms (sorting). The first part of this thesis goes over this recent literature, and based on research from different countries, it is evident that firm pay policies have a non-negligible effect on the gender wage gap. The empirical part of this thesis uses Finnish data from organized firms, which are covered by collective agreements, over the period 2012-2021 and estimates the firm effects gap and its components in the overall sample and in various subgroups. Compared to other studies, the effect of firm pay policies on the gender wage gap is moderate in the overall sample: according to highest (lowest) estimate they explain 24.9% (4.9%) of the overall gender wage gap. Gender wage gaps increase over the life cycle, but this cannot be explained by firm pay policies as the firm effects gap and its components stay roughly at the same level across age groups. Firm effects gaps are smaller among people with a higher education degree and in larger firms, but differences are small. While gender wage gaps are larger for high earners, firm effects gaps are smaller in upper wage deciles. Although collective agreements are a prevalent feature of Finnish labor markets, not all firms are covered by them. Also, the sample is restricted to organized firms, which are not the only firms covered by collective agreements due to general applicability, and many small firms are excluded. Therefore, it is unclear whether these results can be generalized to the whole private sector in Finland.

Taking the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) as a case study, this thesis contributes to the understanding of how the SDP and centre-left parties more generally were neoliberalised, this is to say how they became to embrace the idea that society is best organised through markets and competition. Drawing from the work of Stephanie Mudge, the thesis focuses on party experts, those party actors oriented towards producing truth-claims of society, hence affecting the way parties conceive the world and speak. Expert’s knowledge, however, is contingent on their social locations. They are often also situated in professional fields that tend to condition which ideas count as legitimate, making their positions explanatory relevant with regards to parties’ disposition and rhetoric. Methodologically the work draws from the tradition of historical sociology and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields. The material utilised consists of (auto)biographies; past historical and social scientific research; reference works; SDP’s archival documents; and historical newspaper and magazine writings and interviews. The central argument is that Mudge’s account—taken as the work’s hypothesis—of the neoliberalisation of centre-left parties in “core countries” (the UK, the US, Sweden, and Germany) is inadequate in the case of the SDP embedded in Finland’s peripheral context. Mudge asserts that a central driver in the parties’ neoliberalisation was the interdependence between the political field of the party and the field of economics, which developed as interwar economic disruption incited an intense search within economics for novel ways to control the economy via public spending and demand management. This also led to an influx of academic economists with a “Keynesian ethic” to centre-left parties. The interdependence, however, allowed for economics’ politicisation from the 1960s onwards, this then influencing the field’s reorientation away from Keynesianism and towards monetarism and subsequently leading to the emergence and triumph of new party experts possessing a “neoliberal ethic”. Relatively stable interwar economic development, the bourgeoisie’s post-Civil War dominance in the society and academia, and the Finnish economics’ “backwardness” meant that no comparable need for seeking novel solutions existed nor was there responsiveness for the ideas developed abroad. Consequently, no interdependence between the SDP and economics developed in interwar or immediate postwar years. In the 1960s economic experts did gain a central position within the party. But these experts were not connected with the academia nor did the SDP embrace “Keynesian” prescriptions, the party and its experts instead banking on the combination of economic planning and export-led growth strategy. Neither was evidence found of economics’ politicisation as a left-wing discipline. Instead, it was oft precisely the SDP’s economic experts that critiqued “Keynesian” academic economists. In sum, arguably no interdependence between economics and the SDP developed either in this period. Instead, a new hypothesis is posited as an alternative account, namely that the SDP’s neoliberalisation can be better accounted for through the interdependence that developed between the bureaucratic field’s economic institutions and the party. Conjecturally, the interdependence, owing, among other things, to the SDP’s political appointments to the state, was politicised and the ideas of economic planning and the state’s control of the economy’s important elements were discredited in the context of the 1970s economic downturn. The interdependence, however, also led to novel kinds of experts—the state economists—gaining a powerful position within the SDP and making their interpretation of the economy common sense in the party. These experts perceived that their role in politics was to advance the “general interest” of the nation and the amorphous “people”, not any segment of it. With the export businesses hegemonic in society, in effect, this meant an emphasis on their profitability, cost competitiveness, and inflation and subsequently wage repression and budget constraint. The affinities between neoliberal notions and this policy conception and the habit in the Finnish state to conceive the world in terms of “external necessities” meant the state economists possessed great responsiveness to neoliberal ideas. While gaining preliminary support from evidence this hypothesis requires further work on several counts.