Essays on job polarization, market power and gender wage inequality[Essais sur la polarisation des emplois, le pouvoir du marché et l'inégalité salariale entre les sexes]

This thesis is comprised of three chapters and it addresses two main questions. First, what is the role of biased technological change in driving aggregate job polarization? Second, what are the consequences of rising market power on wage inequality? In the first chapter, I show that labor supply factors are relatively more important than routine-biased technological change (RBTC) in explaining job polarization. In the second chapter, we show that an increase in market power contributes roughly 12.85% to the rise in the skill premium, and explains approximately half of the rise in between-firm wage inequality in the US. In the third chapter, joint work with, we study how changes in female representation at the top of a firm's organization affect gender-specific outcomes across hierarchies within firms. We exploit a recent French reform that imposed gender representation quotas in the boards of directors and test the model's predictions in the data. Our empirical results show that the reform was successful in reducing gender wage and representation gaps at the upper layers of the firm, but not at lower firm layers.