This article employs a Counterfactual Decomposition Analysis (CDA) using both a semi-parametric and a non-parametric method to examine the pay gap, over the entire wage distribution, between secure and insecure workers on the basis of perceived job insecurity. Using the 2015 INAPP Survey on Quality of Work, our results exhibit a mirror J-shaped pattern in the pay gap, with a significant sticky floor effect, i.e. the job insecurity more relevant at the lowest quantiles. This pattern is mainly due to the characteristics effect, while the relative incidence of the coefficient component accounts roughly for 22 up to 36% of the total difference, being more relevant at the bottom of the wage distribution.

The analysis of wage distribution has attracted scholars from different disciplines seeking to develop theoretical arguments to explain the upward or downward trend. In particular, how the middle management wage premium changes in different contexts is a relatively neglected area of research. This study argues that wage distribution changes in different contexts, representing different forms of capitalism. To shed light on this, we considered the size and the shape of the wage premium to supervision paid to middle managers in Germany and the UK. We find evidence of two forms of context: middle managers are paid differently for the same task according to the economy where they work; of this amount, about half of the difference is related to the context. We frame the analysis within the literature on varieties of capitalism.

The Routine-Biased Technological Change (RBTC) has been called as a relatively novel technologybased explanation of social changes like job and wage polarization. In this paper we investigate the wage inequality between routine and non-routine workers along the wage distribution in Italy. Thanks to unique survey data, we can estimate the wage differential using both actual and perceived level of routine intensity of jobs to classify workers. We adopt semi-parametric decomposition techniques to quantify the importance of characteristics of workers in explaining the gaps. We also employ nonparametric techniques to account for self-selection bias. We find evidence of a significant U-shaped pattern of the wage gap, according to both definitions, with non-routine workers earning always significantly more than routine workers. Results show that workers' characteristics fully explain the gap in the case of perceived routine, while they account for no more than 50% of the gap across the distribution in the case of actual routine. Thus, results highlight the importance of taking into account workers' perceptions when analyzing determinants of wage inequality. Overall, we confirm that, after leading to job polarization, RBTC induced a similar polarizing effects on wages in Italy.

The aim of this paper is to explore the potential of EU-SILC data to deepen our understanding of the determinants of workers’ formal lifelong learning (LLL) incidence in Europe. To this purpose, a twofold procedure is adopted here: first, LLL incidence is estimated for the total number of men and women taken separately, regardless of their country of residence; second, the information on the country where they live is taken into account and 21 country-specific equations are computed. Again, this is made for both sexes. This procedure allows us to shed light on cross-country gender differences. In the whole sample, our results show that for both men and women formal LLL incidence is significantly higher among young, better-educated, part-time and temporary workers, and lower among those who changed their job in the preceding year, are employed in small firms and have low-skilled occupations. When the above-mentioned separate equations are estimated for each country and for both sexes, relevant results emerge in the case of Scandinavian countries. Those results seem to be consistent with the implementation of the well-known “flexicurity” policy.

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