82
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If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?
There could be several reasons here are just few:
Principal-agent problems. Firms are typically not managed by their owners but by managers (agents) who act on the behalf of owners/shareholders (...
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36
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If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?
Quite simple. If women are paid less, then that's because people believe their work to be worth less. The same believe, that womens work is worth less, then stops employers from hiring more women.
(...
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35
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How does everyone not become poor over time?
In short because economy is not a zero-sum game and because economic production does not need to decline but can grow over time.
First of all, forget about money. Money in economics is just extra ...
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31
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Why do many occupations show a gender bias?
I should say pre-emptively that I'm not satisfied with ideas that merely may explain the effect, as yesterday's question produced a proliferation of rationalisations and claims that lacked rigour.
I'...
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30
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If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?
Because women are not paid less for the same work when all the variables are taken into equasion.
Caveat: below answer is a nearly verbatim copy of my earlier answer on Politics.SE on the topic
In ...
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27
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Would poorer countries be better off by cutting off all trade with rich countries?
Would poorer countries be better off by cutting off all trade with rich countries?
Almost certainly not.
One of the largest consensus in economic profession is that free trade and openness is ...
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19
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Why do many occupations show a gender bias?
I'm hesitant whether to write this as an answer or as a comment for why this question should be closed as off-topic, since the reasons likely have little to do with economics. Since you did ...
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13
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If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?
I must preface that the original question as it stands is way too broad.
It probably needs to be cut down into smaller parts, but that's hard to know how to do if you are a layperson. This question ...
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9
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If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?
This is an interesting question, and I don't have a good answer. Just pointing out about the second part that the canonical labour market model of Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides views a labour market ...
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9
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If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?
It has been shown numerous times that the apparent pay gap is largely due to women having to work part time or take time off for maternity leave, and that the gap is correspondingly in a narrow age ...
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9
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Would poorer countries be better off by cutting off all trade with rich countries?
The Guardian article reports that poor workers make the rich richer.
That may be unjust (the Guardian thinks so), but "Making the rich richer" is not the same as "making the poor poorer&...
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8
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Why do many occupations show a gender bias?
There have been several good answers that tackle the economic reasons already; but let me take a different approach. More or less the same approach of INNONOTING, but he got downvoted probably because ...
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8
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Why do many occupations show a gender bias?
Slate Star Codex has a long, well researched article. TL DR: It is very likely that women as a group have more members who care about persons / living things and men as a group have more members who ...
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7
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Calculating Gini Coeffecient
All of these answers are true but don't provide an easy solution which doesn't use excel/code. Gini can be fairly easily computed by hand too.
The Gini coefficient fundamentally shows the shaded ...
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7
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Gini index vs Herfindahl index: one increases while the other decreases
They measure different things. In particular the Gini index measures inequality and is strongly affected by the number of individuals with almost nothing, while the Herfindahl index measures the ...
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7
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Is it viable to put a cap on personal wealth in the U.S.?
Wealth cap that would confiscate and redistribute wealth above certain limit is in an essence just different term for wealth tax (as opposed to situations where there would be just a ban on having ...
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7
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How does everyone not become poor over time?
Just adding to the great answer by 1muflon1. There is a fallacy in your argument: some money goes to pay for goods, but in capitalism there are property rights, so those goods (like land or the ...
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7
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If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?
This is a very good question and I agree with the answer about the 'wage gap'. Education is a point that I want to add here.
A survey was recently conducted in the construction labour market in China. ...
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Do inheritances break Piketty's r>g model's conclusions?
It actually does not change conclusions from his model. Piketty's model is not about income inequality per se, it is about inequality between capital's and labor's share of income. Piketty's model ...
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5
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If women are paid less for the same work, why don't employers hire just women?
The gender pay gap is not statistical significant, as claimed by the mainstream economists.
Check this AER paper by a famous female scholar:
C. Goldin (2014) A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last ...
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4
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Is wealth inequality actually a problem
Scrooge McDuck likes swimming in money, which is why he accumulates a lot of it without any intention of ever spending it. If you think bringing in Scrooge McDuck is far-fetched and irrelevant, you ...
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4
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Has US real median personal/household income been stagnant since the late 1970's/early 1980's?
As said in the comments, there is an important difference between household income and wages. Household income includes income from capital. As a higher share of total income is going to capital than ...
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4
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Income/Wealth Inequality; Why does it matter?
There could be some complicated models where high inequality could have effect on efficiency - the research is inconclusive (or to be more precise almost non existent) on the matter.
However, in ...
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4
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Why is imputed rental income for owner-occupied housing included in the measurement of household income?
The household owns an asset, the house, from which an income can be derived. The household could decide to let the house and with the income rent another house. Alternatively, the household could ...
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4
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Does quantitative easing favour banks?
Will this policy advantage the financial sector over other parts of the economy?
I do not see how this would a priori advantage the financial sector over other parts of the economy. This policy is ...
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4
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Can you prove, and with what assumptions, that a market will allocate some minimum amount of basic resources to every worker?
There is no guarantee that anyone in market economy earns some subsistence minimum. Generally, wage depends on marginal product of worker's labor and if there are some quasi-rents to be had also on ...
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4
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Dealing with integrals in econ models
The Lagrangian is the following:
$$
L = \left(\int_0^1 C_t(i)^{1 - \frac{1}{\varepsilon}}di \right)^{\frac{\varepsilon}{\varepsilon-1}} - \lambda\left(\int_0^1 P_t(i) C_t(i) di - Z_t\right)
$$
Let $\...
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