Tag: foreign ownership

Risks of Russian Business Ownership in Georgia

Posted on November 27, 2023 | Policy Brief

Image of Tbilisi at night representing risks of Russian business ownership in Georgia

This policy brief addresses risks tied to Russian business ownership in Georgia. The concentration of this ownership in critical sectors such as electricity and communications makes Georgia vulnerable to risks of political influence, corruption, economic manipulation, espionage, sabotage, and sanctions evasion. To minimize these risks, it is recommended to establish a Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) screening mechanism for Russia-originating investments, acknowledge the risks in national security documents, and implement a critical infrastructure reform.

Russia exerts substantial influence over Georgia. First and foremost, Russia has annexed 20 percent of Georgia’s internationally recognized territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Further, it employs a variety of hybrid methods to disrupt the Georgian society including disinformation, support for pro-Russian parties and media, trade restrictions, transportation blockades, sabotage incidents, and countless more. These tactics aim to hinder Georgia’s development, weaken the country’s statehood, and negatively affect pro-Western public sentiments (Seskuria, 2021 and Kavtaradze, 2023).

Factors that may also increase Georgia’s economic dependency on Russia concern trade relationships, remittances, increased economic activity driven by the most recent influx of Russian migrants, and private business ownership by Russian entities or citizens (Babych, 2023 and Transparency International Georgia, 2023). This policy brief assesses and systematizes the risks associated with Russian private business ownership in Georgia.

Sectoral Overview of Russian Business Ovnership

Russian business ownership is significant in Georgia. Recent research from the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information (IDFI) has addressed Russian capital accumulation across eight sectors of the Georgian economy: electricity, oil and gas, communications, banking, mining and mineral waters, construction, tourism, and transportation. Of the eight sectors considered by IDFI, Russian business ownership is most visible in Georgia’s electricity sector, followed by oil and natural gas, communications, and mining and mineral waters industries. In the remaining four sectors considered by IDFI, a low to non-existent level of influence was observed (IDFI, 2023).

Figure 1. Overview of Russian Ownership in the Georgian Economy as of June 2023.

Source: IDFI, 2023.

There are several reasons for concern regarding the concentration and distribution of Russian business ownership in the Georgian economy.

First, it is crucial to keep Russia’s history as a hostile state actor in mind. Foreign business ownership is not a threat in itself; However, it may pose a threat if businesses are under control or influence of a state that is hostile to the country in question (see Larson and Marchik, 2006). Business ownership has been a powerful tool for the Kremlin, allowing Russia to influence various countries and raising concerns that such type of foreign ownership might negatively affect national security of the host country (Conley et al., 2016). Similar concerns have become imperative amidst Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine (as, for instance, reflected in Guidance of the European Commission to member states concerning Russian foreign acquisitions).

Further, Russian business ownership in Georgia is particularly threatening due to the ownership concentration within sectors of critical significance for the overall security and economic resilience of the country. While there is no definition of critical infrastructure or related sectors in Georgia, at least two sectors (energy and communications) correspond to critical sectors, according to international standards (see for instance the list of critical infrastructure sectors for the European Union, Germany, Canada and Australia). Such sectors are inherently susceptible to a range of internal and external threats (a description of threats related to critical infrastructure can be found here). Intentional disruptions to critical infrastructure operations might initiate a chain reaction and paralyze the supply of essential services. This can, in turn, trigger major threats to the social, economic, and ecological security and the defense capacity of a state.

Georgia’s Exposure to Risks

Identifying and assessing the specific dimensions of Georgia’s exposure to risks related to Russian business ownership provides a useful foundation for designing policy responses. This brief identifies six distinct threats in this regard.

Political Influence

Russia’s business and political interests are closely intertwined, making it challenging to differentiate their respective motives. This interconnectedness can act as a channel for exerting political influence in Georgia. Russians that have ownership stakes in Georgian industries (e.g. within electricity, communications, oil and gas, mining and mineral waters) have political ties with the Russian ruling elite facing Western sanctions, or are facing sanctions themselves. For instance, Mikhail Fridman, who owns up to 50 percent of the mineral water company IDS Borjomi, is sanctioned for supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine. Such interlacing raises concerns about indirect Russian influence in Georgia, potentially undermining Georgia’s Western aspirations.

Export of Corrupt Practices

The presence of notable Russian businesses in Georgia poses a significant threat in terms of it nurturing corrupt practices. Concerns include “revolving door” incidents (movement of upper-level public officials into high-level private-sector jobs, or vice versa), tax evasion, and exploitation of the public procurement system.  For instance, Transparency International Georgia (2023) identified a “revolving door” incident concerning the Russian company Inter RAO Georgia LLC, involved in electricity trading, and its regulator, the Georgian state-owned Electricity Market Operator JSC (ESCO). One day after Inter RAO Georgia LLC was registered, the director of ESCO took a managerial position within Inter RAO Georgia LLC. Furthermore, tax evasion inquiries involving Russian-owned companies have been documented in the region, particularly in Armenia, further highlighting corruption risks. We argue that such corrupt practices might harm the business environment and deter future international investments.

Economic Manipulation

A heavy concentration of foreign ownership in critical sectors like energy and telecommunications, also poses a risk of manipulation of economic instruments such as prices. The significant Russian ownership in Armenia’s gas distribution network exemplifies this threat. In fact, Russia utilized a price manipulation strategy for gas prices when Armenia declared its EU aspirations. Prices were then reduced after Armenia joined the Eurasian Economic Union (Terzyan, 2018).

Espionage

Russian-owned businesses within Georgia’s critical sectors also pose espionage risks, including economic and cyber espionage. Owners of such businesses may transfer sensitive information to Russian intelligence agencies, potentially undermining critical infrastructure operations. As an example, in 2022, a Swedish business owner in electronic trading and former Russian resident, was indicted with transferring secret economic information to Russia. Russian cyber-espionage is also known to be used for worldwide disinformation campaigns impacting public opinion and election results, compromising democratic processes.

Sabotage

The presence of Russian-owned businesses in Georgia raises the risk of sabotage and incapacitation of critical assets. Russia has a history of using sabotage to harm other countries, such as when they disrupted Georgia’s energy supply in 2006 and the recent Kakhovka Dam destruction in Ukraine (which had far-reaching consequences, incurring environmental damages, and posing a threat to nuclear plants). These incidents demonstrate the risk of cascading effects, potentially affecting power supply, businesses, and locations strategically important to Georgia’s security.

Sanctions and Sanction Evasion

Russian-owned businesses in Georgia face risks due to Western sanctions as they could be targeted by sanctions or used to evade them. Recent cases, like with IDS Borjomi (as previously outlined) and VTB Bank Georgia – companies affected by Western sanctions given their Russian connections – highlight Georgia’s economic vulnerability in this regard. Industries where these businesses operate play a significant role in Georgia’s economy and job market, and instabilities within such sectors could entail social and political concerns. There’s also a risk that these businesses could help Russia bypass sanctions and gain access to sensitive goods and technologies, going against Georgia’s support for international sanctions against Russia. It is crucial to prevent such sanctions-associated risks for the Georgian economy.

Assessing the Risks

To operationalize the above detailed risks, we conducted interviews with Georgian field experts within security, economics, and energy. The risk assessment highlights political influence through Russian ownership in Georgian businesses as the foremost concern, followed by risks of corruption, risks related to sanctions, espionage, economic manipulation, and sabotage. We asked the experts to assess the severity level for each identified risk and notably, all identified risks carry a high severity level.

Recommendations

Considering the concerns detailed in the previous sections, we argue that Russia poses a threat in the Georgian context. Given the scale and concentration of Russian ownership within critical sectors and infrastructure, a dedicated policy regime might be required to improve regulation and minimize the associated risks. Three recommendations could be efficient in this regard, as outlined below.

Study the Impact of Adopting a Foreign Direct Investment Screening Mechanism

To effectively address ownership-related threats, it’s essential to modify existing investment policies. One approach is to introduce a FDI screening mechanism with specific functionalities. Several jurisdictions implement mechanisms with similar features (see a recent report by UNCTAD for further details). Usually, such mechanisms target FDI’s that have security implications. A dedicated screening authority overviews investment that might be of concern for national security and after assessment, an investment might be approved or suspended. In Georgia, a key consideration for designing such tool includes whether it should selectively target investments from countries like Russia or apply to all incoming FDI. Additionally, there’s a choice between screening all investments or focusing on those concerning critical sectors and infrastructure. Evaluating the investment volume, possibly screening only FDI’s exceeding a predefined monetary value, is also a vital aspect to consider. However, it’s important to acknowledge that FDI screening mechanisms are costly. Therefore, this brief suggests a thorough cost and benefit analysis prior to implementing a FDI screening regime in Georgia.

Consider Russian Ownership-related Threats in the National Security Documents

Several national-level documents address security policy in Georgia, with the National Security Concept – outlining security directions – being a foundational one. Currently, these concepts do not specifically address Russian business ownership-related threats. When designing an FDI screening mechanism, however, acknowledging various risks related to Russian business ownership must be aligned with fundamental national security documents.

Foster the Adoption of a Critical Infrastructural Reform

To successfully implement a FDI screening mechanism unified, nationwide agreement on the legal foundations for identifying and safeguarding critical infrastructure is needed. The current concept for critical infrastructure reform in Georgia envisages a definition of critical infrastructure and an implementation of an FDI screening mechanism. We therefore recommend implementing this reform in the country.

Conclusion

This policy brief has identified six distinct risks related to Russian business ownership in several sectors of the Georgian economy, such as energy, communications, oil and natural gas, and mining and mineral waters. Even though Georgia does not have a unified definition of critical infrastructure, assets concentrated in these sectors are regarded as critical according to international standards. Considering Russia’s track record of hostility and bearing in mind threats related to foreign business ownership by malign states, this brief suggests regulating Russian business ownership in Georgia by introducing a FDI screening instrument. To operationalize this recommendation, it is further recommended to consider Russian business ownership-related threats in Georgia’s fundamental security documents and to foster critical infrastructural reform in the country.

References

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in policy briefs and other publications are those of the authors; they do not necessarily reflect those of the FREE Network and its research institutes.

Investing, Producing and Paying Taxes Under Weak Property Rights

Posted on February 21, 2022 | Policy Brief

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Oil majors often choose to operate in countries with weak property rights. This may appear surprising, since the lack of constraints on governments may create incentives to renege on initial promises with firms and renegotiate tax payments once investments have occurred and, in the worst case, expropriate the firm. In theory, backloading investments, production and tax payments may be used to create self-enforcing agreements which do not depend on legal enforcement. Using a new dataset covering the universe of oil majors’ assets that started production between 1974 and 1999, we indeed show in a recent CEPR Working Paper (Paltseva, Toews, and Troya-Martinez, 2022) that investments, production and tax payments are delayed by two years in countries with weak institutions relative to countries with strong institutions. Extending the dataset back to 1960 and exploiting the transition to a new world oil order where expropriation became easier, allows us to interpret our estimates as causal. In particular, prior to the transition expropriations were not feasible, due to the omnipresent and credible military threat imposed by the oil majors’ countries of origin. As the new order sat in, a new equilibrium emerged, in which expropriations became a feasible option. This transition incited an increase in expropriations and forced firms to adjust to the new reality by backloading contracts.

The Hold-up Problem

In December of 2006, when the oil price was climbing towards new heights, the Guardian reported that the Russian government was about to successfully force Shell into transferring their controlling stake in a huge liquified gas project back into the hands of the government. While officially this was motivated by environmental concerns surrounding the Sakhalin-II project, most observers agreed that this might be considered a textbook example of the hold-up problem faced by oil firms when investing in countries with limited constraints on the executive. At its core, the hold-up problem refers to the idea that the government may renege on the initial promise and appropriate a bigger share of the pie once investments have been made. Obviously, this is not an oil-specific issue and concerns any type of investment in countries with weak property rights. Academics, who worked on resolving these issues, suggest the use of self-enforcing agreements (Thomas and Worrall, 1994). These agreements use future gains from trade (as opposed to third-party enforcement) to incentivize the governments not to expropriate. And while the theoretical literature has prolifically developed over the last 30 years (Ray, 2002), to the best of our knowledge no empirical evidence has been provided on the use and dynamic patterns of self-enforcing backloaded contracts.

Data and Sample

In Paltseva, Toews and Troya-Martinez (2022), we rely on micro-level data on oil and gas projects provided by Rystad Energy, an energy consultancy based in Norway. Its database contains current and historical data on physical, geological and financial features for the universe of oil and gas assets. We focus on the assets owned by the oil majors (BP, Chevron, ConocoPhilips, Eni, ExxonMobile, Shell, and Total) using all assets that started production between 1960 and 1999, leaving us with a total of 3494 assets. An asset represents a production site with at least one well, operated by at least one firm, and with the initial property right being owned by at least one country. Being able to conduct the analysis on the asset level is particularly valuable since it allows us to control for a large number of confounding factors and rule out several alternative explanations of our main finding.

Moreover, there are three advantages of focusing our analysis on the oil and gas sector in general and the oil majors in particular. First, the sunk investments in the development of oil and gas wells are enormous, making the hold-up problem in the oil sector particularly severe. Second, oil majors have been around for many years since all of them were created before WWII. This provides us with a sufficiently long horizon to capture backloading over time. Third, the majors are simultaneously investing in many countries which provides us the necessary cross-sectional variation in institutional quality. To differentiate between countries with weak and strong institutions, we use a specific dimension from the Polity IV dataset measuring the constraints on the executive. The location of all the assets disaggregated by firm as well as a binary distinction in a country’s institutional quality is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Spatial distribution of assets and institutional quality

Note: Location and ownership of assets are provided by Rystad Energy. The executive constraint indicator is taken from Polity IV and we use the median from the period 1950 to 1975 to define whether the country is considered to have strong or weak institutions. The cut-off of 5 implies that roughly 1/3 of the countries are defined as having strong institutions and roughly 50% of all the assets which started operation between 1950 and 2000 are located in countries with weak institutions.

A Stylized Fact

For the empirical analysis, our variables of interest are investment, production and tax payments normalized by the respective asset-specific cumulative sum over a period of 35 years. The resulting cumulative shares are depicted in Figure 2. We focus on physical production which, in addition to being considered the most reliable measure of an asset’s activity, does not require discounting. Real values of investment and tax payment depict a very similar picture. Most importantly, the dashed lines illustrate that 2/3 of cumulative production shares are reached approximately two years earlier in countries with strong institutions, in comparison to countries with weak institutions. The average asset size does not differ significantly between these groups. Such delays are costly for countries with weak institutions. Our back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the average country loses around 120 million US$ per year due to the delayed production and the respective tax payments. We confirm that the two-year delay cannot be explained by geographical, geological or financial confounders such as the location of the well, fuel type or contract features.

Figure 2. Years to reach 66% of cumulative flows in 35 years

Note: We use the Epanechnikov kernel with an optimally chosen bandwidth to plot the cumulative production over the 35-year life span of the asset. We group countries into two groups with weak and strong institutions according to Polity IV. This figure contains assets that started producing between 1975 and 1999.

The Transition to a New World Order

To push towards a causal interpretation of the results, we exploit the global transition to a new world oil order. This change affected the probability of expropriations in countries with weak institutions while leaving countries with strong institutions unaffected. In particular, the post-WWII weakening of the OECD members as political and military actors provides a natural experiment of global proportions. Expropriations are first viewed as impossible due to the military threat of British, French and US armies, and then become possible due to a global movement aiming at returning sovereignty over natural resources to the resource-rich economies. In the words of Daniel Yergin (1993): “The postwar petroleum order in the Middle East had been developed and sustained under American-British ascendancy. By the latter half of the 1960s, the power of both nations was in political recession, and that meant the political basis for the petroleum order was also weakening. […] For some in the developing world […] the lessons of Vietnam were […] that the dangers and costs of challenging the United States were less than they had been in the past, certainly nowhere near as high as they had been for Mossadegh, [the Iranian politician challenging UK and US before the coup d’etat in 1953], while the gains could be considerable.” Consequently, the number of expropriations has grown substantially since 1968, marking the transition to a new world order (Figure 3). However, Kobrin (1980) finds that even during the peak of expropriations in 1960-1976, only less than 5 % of all foreign-owned firms in the developing countries were expropriated. We suggest that this is, at least partly, thanks to the use of backloaded self-enforcing contracts.

Figure 3. Transition to a new world order

Note: Data on firm expropriations across all industries from Kobrin (1984).

Indeed, focusing on the years around the transition to the new world oil order, we show that there have not been any differences in investment, production or tax payments dynamics between countries with weak and strong institutions in the early years of the 1960s. But investment, production and the payments of taxes started experiencing significant delays after 1968 in the countries with weak institutions, using countries with strong institutions as a control. Intuitively, the omnipresence of a credible military threat in response to an expropriation served as an effective substitute for strong local formal institutions and eliminated the need for contracts to be self-enforced and backloaded in countries with weak institutions. Once this threat disappeared, contracts had to be self-enforcing and investment, production and tax payments had to be backloaded to decrease the risk of being expropriated by the governments of resource-rich economies. Theoretically, these initial differences in contract backloading between countries with strong and weak institutions should disappear in the long run, because the future gains from trade need to materialize eventually. We confirm empirically that this point is reached on average 20 years after firms start a contractual relationship with a country.

Conclusion

We provide evidence that oil firms seem to backload contracts in countries with weak institutions. We show that such backloading appears in the data during the transition to a new world order since 1968, when firms were in need of a new mechanism to deal with weak property rights and the risk of expropriations. We estimate the cost of such delays to be around 120 US$ per country and year. While this cost is high, it is important to emphasize that in the absence of such backloading, forward-looking CEOs of oil majors would often choose not to invest in the first place, since they would anticipate the severe commitment problems (Cust and Harding, 2020). Thus, as a second-best, the cost of the backloading may be marginal compared to the value added from trade when oil majors are willing to invest in countries with weak institutions and questionable property rights.

References

 

Gender Gaps in Wages and Wealth: Evidence from Estonia

Posted on November 18, 2019 | Policy Brief

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This policy brief introduces two related papers examining two types of gender gaps in Estonia. First, it presents the work of Vahter and Masso (2019), who study the wage gender gaps in foreign-owned firms and compare this gap with the situation in domestic ones. Then it summarizes a paper of Meriküll, Kukk, and Rõõm (2019), who focus on the wealth gender gaps and highlight the role of entrepreneurship in this gap.

Gender inequality is not only a moral issue. An extensive literature has highlighted the cost of gender inequality in terms of economic (in)efficiency. Most of the academic work has, however, focused on either the US and Western Europe or developing countries. Research focusing on systematic gender disparities in Eastern Europe is rather scarce. Yet, there is much to be learned from this region. The purpose of the FROGEE (Forum for Research on Gender in Eastern Europe) project is to study several issues related to gender inequality in former socialist countries.

This policy brief summarizes two papers presented at the 2nd Baltic Economic Conference at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, on June 10-11, where a special session on gender economics was held with the support of the FROGEE project. The event, organized by the Baltic Economic Association (see balticecon.org), gathered more than 85 researchers from the Baltics and all over the world. These two papers focus on Estonia, one of the most successful economies among the transition countries, where however the gender wage gap is among the largest in the European Union.

Firm ownership and gender wage gap

An important source of wage inequality originates in firm-specific pay schemes (see for instance Card et al. 2016). Understanding the characteristics of firms associated with a gender pay gap is thus a necessary step to design relevant policy responses. In a paper entitled “The contribution of multinationals to wage inequality: foreign ownership and the gender pay gap”, Jaan Masso and Priit Vahter, both at the University of Tartu, compare the situation in foreign-owned firms with domestic ones. The fact that foreign-owned firms provide on average higher wages to their employees is well documented. However, the question of whether this premium differs between men and women remains largely overlooked.

A potential channel linking firm ownership and gender wage gap is the transfer of management practices from the home country of the investor to the affiliate. The great majority of FDI in Estonia originates from Finland and Sweden, two countries that regularly top international rankings on gender equality and that have set the fight against gender inequality as a top priority. Observing a lower level of gender wage gap in firms owned by Swedish and Finnish capital would suggest the existence of such a mechanism, even if there is evidence that Scandinavian countries do not stand out in a positive way when it comes to women in the top of the distribution (see for instance Boschini et al., 2018, and Bobilev et al., 2019).

On the other hand, Goldin (2014) has shown that a large part of the gender wage gap in the US can be explained by differences in job “commitment”: firms disproportionately reward workers willing to be available 24/7, more flexible regarding business trips, spending longer hours in the office, etc. Such workers happen to be more often men than women. Multinational firms may require such commitment and flexibility to a larger extent than domestic firms, due for instance to their higher exposure to international competition. This would imply a larger gender pay gap in foreign-owned firms compared to local firms.

To investigate this issue, Masso and Vahter (2019) rely on Estonian administrative data, providing information on the whole universe of workers and of firms in the country between 2006 and 2014. This matched employer-employee dataset allows to track the wage of individuals over the years, but also to compare wages both across and within firms. It thus becomes possible to estimate the gender wage gap at the firm level (controlling for relevant individual-level factors affecting wages, such as age and experience), and then to check whether this measure systematically differs between domestic and foreign-owned firms.

However, simply comparing the gender pay gap between these two types of firms could lead to spurious conclusions. Foreign-owned firms have on average different characteristics than domestic ones: they do not operate in the same sectors, they do not have the same size nor the same productivity. To overcome this issue, the authors rely on a matching method: for each foreign-owned firms, they match a domestic firm with similar (observable) characteristics.

They find that in domestic firms, women are on average paid 19% less than men, even after accounting for many other factors associated with wage. In foreign-owned companies, both men and women are better paid. However, both genders do not benefit from the same premium: men are paid roughly 15% more in foreign-owned firms, whereas the premium for women is only 5.4%. This difference implies an even larger gender wage gap in multinational firms. To illustrate the economic significance of these results, for a man and a woman earning a monthly wage of 1146 euros (the average gross wage in Estonia in 2016), the premium for switching from a domestic to a foreign-owned firm is respectively 171 and 62 euros. Further, they provide some evidence that lower “commitment” is associated with a stronger wage penalty in foreign-owned firms. All in all, these results suggest that there is not necessarily a relationship between a multinational wage policy (especially in its gender wage-gap dimension) and the gender norms prevailing in its country of incorporation.

Gender and wealth gap

The vast majority of academic papers studying gender inequality focuses on the wage gap. But gender inequality can affect other types of economic outcomes, such as labor force participation, unemployment duration, or wealth. The latter is of particular interest since wealth can greatly contribute to empowerment. Merike Kukk, Jaanika Meriküll and Tairi Rõõm, all at the Bank of Estonia, extend the literature with a paper entitled “What explains the Gender Gap in Wealth? Evidence from Administrative Data”. This paper is one of the first to study the gender wealth gap in a post-transition country. The literature on the gender wealth gap is rather scarce because of a lack of suitable data: wealth measures are often computed at the household level, while individual-level data is necessary for such a study.

The main aim of this paper is to depict a precise portrait of this phenomenon in Estonia. In particular, the authors do not simply estimate the overall wealth gap but investigate the magnitude of the gap across the wealth distribution. In other words, is there a difference between the poorest men and the poorest women? Or on the other side of the distribution, are the richest men more wealthy than the richest women?

For this purpose, Kukk, Meriküll and Rõõm combine administrative individual-level data on wealth with survey results. The administrative data are generally considered of much better quality than the other, but they do not provide a lot of additional information on individuals. On the other hand, survey data provide a wealth of information about individual characteristics. Merging allows getting the best of both worlds. Regarding the methodology, the authors use unconditional quantile regression to track gender differences at different deciles of the wealth distribution. They further decompose this “raw” gender gap into two components: the “explained” part, i.e., the part of the gap resulting in differences in characteristics between men and women (demographics, education, etc.), and the “unexplained” part.

This study estimates the raw, unconditional gender wealth gap in Estonia to be 45%, which is of similar magnitude as in Germany. Interestingly, this difference is essentially driven by differences in the top of the distribution: there is a large gap between the richest men and the richest women. This “raw” difference is however explained by a single variable: self-employment, as men are much more likely to have business assets than women. Once controlling for the entrepreneurship status, the wealth difference between the richest Estonians becomes insignificant. This suggests the need to support policies encouraging female entrepreneurship and to remove barriers particularly affecting women. For instance, the literature has previously pointed out that women have less access to external sources of capital than men (e.g., Aidis et al., 2007). Such distortions can ultimately result in a wealth gap at the top of the distribution, as documented by this paper.

In addition, the literature has proposed several mechanisms that could result in gender-specific patterns of wealth accumulation. The simplest channel is through the wage gap, as it can be seen as the accumulation of the wage gap over time (e.g. Blau and Kahn, 2000). The authors thus compare the gender gaps in wealth and income. They uncover a strong wage gap, with men earning significantly more than women starting at the 6th decile: the higher we go in the income distribution, the larger the wage gap. How to reconcile this finding with the absence of a wealth gap conditional on entrepreneurship status? A possible explanation suggested by the authors is that women simply accumulate wealth better than men do.

Conclusion

These two papers illustrate two different mechanisms explaining gender-specific economic outcomes. The larger wage gap observed in multinational companies can be explained by a stronger commitment penalty for women, mostly because of childcare. This asks for two potential policy interventions. First, the development of childcare could facilitate the reduction in the “commitment gap” that disrupts women’s careers. Second, institutions could support a more flexible repartition of childcare responsibilities. Note however that Estonia already has the longest duration of leave at full pay (85 weeks), and that this leave can be freely split between parents. As for the wealth gap at the top of the wealth distribution, it can to a large extent be explained by the entrepreneurship status. This difference could partly be explained by differences in preferences and risk-aversion, which would require long-run policies to be mitigated. But in the short run, there is room for specific policies supporting female entrepreneurship and removing barriers particularly affecting women, such as a tighter credit constraint.

References

  • Aidis, R., Welter, F., Smallbone, D., & Isakova, N. (2007). Female entrepreneurship in transition economies: the case of Lithuania and Ukraine. Feminist Economics, 13(2), 157-183.
  • Blau, F. D., & Kahn, L. M. (2000). Gender differences in pay.  Journal of Economic perspectives, 14(4), 75-99.
  • Bobilev, R., Boschini, A., & Roine, J. (2019). Women in the Top of the Income Distribution: What Can We Learn From LIS-Data?. Italian Economic Journal, 1-45.
  • Boschini, A., Gunnarsson, K., & Roine, J. (2018). Women in Top Incomes: Evidence from Sweden 1974-2013. IZA Discussion Paper No. 10979 .
  • Card, D., Cardoso, A. R., & Kline, P. (2015). Bargaining, sorting, and the gender wage gap: Quantifying the impact of firms on the relative pay of women. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131(2), 633-686.
  • Goldin, C. (2014). A grand gender convergence: Its last chapter. American Economic Review, 104(4), 1091-1119.
  • Meriküll, J., Kukk, M., & Rõõm, T. (2019). What explains the gender gap in wealth? Evidence from administrative data. Bank of Estonia WP No. 2019-04.
  • Vahter, P., & Masso, J. (2019). The contribution of multinationals to wage inequality: foreign ownership and the gender pay gap. Review of World Economics, 155(1), 105-148.