The objective of this research is to understand if large gender employment and participation gaps in Macedonia can shed some light on the gender wage gap. A large contingent of inactive women in Macedonia including long-term unemployed due to the transition process, female remittance receivers from the male migrant, unpaid family workers in agriculture and so on, is outside employment, but is not necessarily having the worst labour-market characteristics. In addition, both gender wage gap and participation gap enlarge as education decreases, revealing the importance of non-random selection of women into employment. Though, the standard Heckman-type correction of the selectivity bias suggests that non-random selection exists, but the resulting wage gap remains at the same level even when selection has been considered. Instead, we perform repeated wage imputations for those not in work, by simply making assumptions on the position of the imputed wage observation with respect to the median. Then, we assess the impact of selection into employment by comparing estimated wage gaps on the base sample versus on an imputed sample. The main result is that selection explains most of the gender wage gap in the primary-education group (75%), followed by the secondary-education group (55%). In the tertiary group, the small initial gap vanishes once selection considered. This suggests that indeed non-working women are not those with the worst labour-market characteristics. Results suggest that gender wage discrimination in Macedonia is actually between 5.4% and 9.8% and does not exist for the highly-educated women. The inability of the Heckman-type correction to document a role for selection in explaining the gender wage gap may be due to the criticisms to the exclusion restrictions and the large amount of missing wages.

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The aim of the study is to examine the factors that affect educational achievements of children from low-income households in Macedonia. In addition, we compare the two distinctive social programs that provide assistance for children from poor households in the country. Our empirical strategy is based on the education production function, which is estimated using the ordinary least squares (OLS) and ordered probit approach. We regress an indicator for educational achievement on three groups of factors: i) individual characteristics; ii) household characteristics; and iii) school-related characteristics/variables.The findings suggest that all three sets of factors are significantly related with the school performance of young individuals. Individual-and family-related factors are more important than the school climate, although this finding may be related to the availability (and hence, the choice) of the school-related variables. Nikica Mojsoska BlazevskiGender, father's education, and ethnicity were found to be significantly related to the educational achievement of students. Among the family factors, we find that the number of rooms at home and household consumption are positively related to school performance. On the other hand, household size, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) acceptance and the measures of parental involvement are negatively related to achievement. We find that only one measure of school context, the average grade in school, is significant.

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The aim of this paper is to learn how to be a better or more effective supervisor through a critical reflection on my own supervisory experience. The importance of the effective supervision is highlighted in view of the established link between effective supervision and greater completion rates of postgraduate degrees, where the latter is main focus of higher education institutions/authorities in the last decade. The reflection is used to not only to justify the way we were supervised, but to challenge it and find ways how we can improve our effective supervision. Several researchers argue that supervisors usually adopt the same supervisory practice and style as the one they experienced themselves as research students (Pearson and Brew, 2002;Lee, 2008; Wright et al., 2008), notwithstanding additional factors that might influence the effectiveness of supervision. Pearson and Brew (2002) argue that new supervisors should have an ability to critically reflect on their past experience as research student in light of the theoretical conceptions and research findings in the literature on supervision, a process called "a critical reflective journey" by Tait (2009, p.193). The methodology for this research is based on the framework for effective supervision adopted by Engebretson et al. (2008) who establish eleven characteristics of an effective supervision. Parallel to the examination of each of those individual characteristics, I provide my insight into each characteristic by reflecting on my own experience. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 1 introduces the importance of an effective supervision in the modern educational environment, as well as the value that critical reflection brings to the learning. Section 2 provides a literature review of the characteristics of a good supervisor, along with a personal experience related to each of them. Section 3 concludes.