We use representative data for firms for Latin American firms and show that corruption decreases employment in firms. This result is robust to changes in specification and also consistent with the use of an instrumental variables approach. Corruption appears to negatively impact the growth and wealth in a country, not by introducing labor distortion in firms, but by keeping them small.

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Despite the recent economic growth and gender equality improvement in educational attainment, important gender disparities remain in the Peruvian labour market. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the Peruvian gender wage gap evolution during 2007–2018 and identifies key elements that explain its patterns. First, the article shows that the raw wage gap showed an upward trend between 2007–2011, ranging from 6% to 12%, and remaining around that top bound ever since. Second, using Oaxaca‐Blinder decomposition we find that the unexplained wage gap has remained virtually unchanged at around 17% during the study period. Reductions in endowment differences between men and women coupled with a stagnant unexplained gap led to slightly larger raw wage gaps over time. Moreover, the stagnant unexplained gap suggests the presence of structural problems regarding social norms, gender stereotyping and potential discrimination that affects the wage gap. Third, we show that both at a national and regional level, gender wage gaps are larger within the lowest percentiles, and they mostly have a downward slope across the earnings distribution. Finally, after computing the raw and unexplained gap at the region‐year level, we show that smaller regional gender gaps are associated with (a) higher GDP, (b) lower levels of domestic physical violence against women, and (c) lower percentages of women as household heads.

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This study explores whether companies´ experience benefits when the firm's CEO and owner are both women. It employs data from the 2009-2014 World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) to measure firms' performance through growth in sales and productivity. Potential endogeneity was corrected by using the UN Gender Development Index and the average fertility rate as they comply with the exclusion restrictions. The paper uses the Control Function method with a Probit first stage estimation and an OLS main equation. The findings suggest that a female owner strengthens the female CEO's business skills and leads to better firm performance than when the CEO is a woman and the owner is a man.