E Mun
Biographic Data
| ID | 14247 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E Mun |
| GIVEN NAMES | E |
| FAMILY NAME | Mun |
| SIGNATURE | MUN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4317-9904 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Beyond individual performance: Collective performance pay and gender wage inequality
Pay-for-performance systems are a defining feature of contemporary workplaces, yet their implications for inequality remain unclear. This paper examines how collective performance pay—where rewards are tied to team-, department-, or firm-level outcomes—shapes gender wage inequality through relational processes of reward distribution. Using linked employer–employee data on 21,339 full-time white-collar employees across 660 South Korean firms betwe…
Dualization of corporate control: Lifetimers, external appointees, and CEO succession in Japan
We investigate mechanisms of institutional stability under profound environmental change, using corporate control in Japan as a critical case. Building on the concept of dualization in the comparative institutions literature, we theorize how dualized power relations at the top of the firm sustain insider control. Using data on executive board members of all non-financial firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange from 1993 to 2016, we show that “li…
Points of departure: Family leave policy and women’s representation in management in U.S. workplaces
This paper theorizes the interplay of public and organizational policies by investigating whether the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) shifted patterns of gender inequality within U.S. workplaces. Did this leave law increase women’s representation in positions of authority (moving more women into management jobs)? We argue that the impact of public policies will vary by organizational context, hypothesizing different effects by organizations’ …
The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the au…
Ups and downs in finance, ups without downs in inequality
The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer-employee-linked data from 1990 to 2019 for 12 countries and data from bank reports, from 2009 to 2017 in 13 …
Meritocracy at Work: Merit-Based Reward Systems and Gender Wage Inequality
It is widely believed that meritocratic employment practices reduce gender inequality by limiting managers’ reliance on nonmerit factors, such as biases. An emerging stream of research, however, questions the belief, arguing that meritocratic practices often fail to reduce inequality and may paradoxically increase it. Despite these opposing predictions, we still lack convincing empirical findings to adjudicate between them. Typically relying on d…
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of co…
Workplace volatility and gender inequality: A comparison of the Netherlands and South Korea
Workplaces have become more unstable in recent decades, but how such instability shapes categorical inequalities remains little understood. This study explores how the rise of employment precarity, re-conceptualized as an attribute of workplaces, affects gender inequality. We argue that gender inequality increases in volatile workplaces where employee tenure is short and turnover is common. In such workplaces, gender stereotyping and opportunity …
Compensatory Work Devotion: How a Culture of Overwork Shapes Women's Parental Leave in South Korea
Despite growing concerns that parental leave policies may reinforce the marginalization of mothers in the labor market and reproduce the gendered division of household labor, few studies examine how women themselves approach and use parental leave. Through 64 in-depth interviews with college-educated Korean mothers, we find that although women's involvement in family responsibilities increases during leave, they do not reduce their work devotion …
Ampleur et évolution de la prime salariale financière
Nous mesurons l’ampleur et l’évolution de la prime salariale liée à un emploi en finance. Dans treize pays développés, les salaires, notamment les hauts salaires, ont augmenté dans ce secteur à un rythme soutenu pendant les années 1990 et 2000, contribuant fortement à l’augmentation de la part du top 1 % national et par conséquent aux inégalités. L’explication de cet écart par des différences de talent ne suffit pas à en rendre compte. En France,…
Changing employment relations under a fractured corporate elite
Shareholder power is often cited as contributing to the deterioration of employment relations. However, managerial power also shapes how shareholder pressures affect workers. In this article, we examine how managerial power contributed to the initial durability and eventual decline of white-collar benefits in the era of shareholder primacy. One traditional source of elite power is the network of overlapping board appointments which helped corpora…
Singlehood in contemporary Japan: Rating, dating, and waiting for a good match
BACKGROUND: Late age at marriage and rising rates of singlehood increasingly characterize East Asian societies. For Japan, these are major contributors to the very low birth rate. OBJECTIVE: We analyze two unique data sets: dating records covering a two-year period from one of Japan's largest marriage agencies and in-depth interviews with 30 highly-educated Japanese singles. The longitudinal nature of the quantitative data allows us to test hypot…
Rising between-workplace inequalities in high-income countries
Significance Understanding the causes of rising inequality is of concern in many countries. Using administrative data, we find that the share of inequality that is between workplaces is growing in 12 of 14 countries examined, and in no country has it fallen. Countries with declining employment protections see growth in both between- and within-workplace inequalities, but this impact is stronger for between-workplace inequalities. These results su…
Occupations, workplaces or jobs: An exploration of stratification contexts using administrative data
Occupations have long been held by sociologists, from the older status attainment tradition to the more recent micro-class tradition, to be at the center of stratification writ large. Occupations are specifically argued to be central to shaping wages. Indeed, this has been understood as the comparative advantage of sociology relative to economics in understanding wage setting. However, an undercurrent has for decades existed in sociology that sug…
Policy Generosity, Employer Heterogeneity, and Women's Employment Opportunities: The Welfare State Paradox Reexamined
Scholars of comparative family policy research have raised concerns about potential negative outcomes of generous family policies, an issue known as the "welfare state paradox." They suspect that such policies will make employers reluctant to hire or promote women into high-authority jobs, because women are more likely than men to use those policies and take time off. Few studies, however, have directly tested this employer-side mechanism. In thi…
Too Few Women at the Top: The Persistence of Inequality in Japan
Revisiting the welfare state paradox: A firm-level analysis from Japan
Between state and family: Managers' implementation and evaluation of parental leave policies in Japan
Work–family policies have been widely adopted in post-industrial societies. This paper brings the organizational level into the analysis of work–family policy effects on female employees. We theorize that managers' evaluation of female employees' use of parental leave is shaped not only by policy content, but also by labour market structure and the dominant cultural model of household gender relations. Using Japan as a case study, we analyse in-d…
Negative Compliance as an Organizational Response to Legal Pressures: The Case of Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Law
Scholars have conceptualized the interaction between law and organizations as a game of tug-of-war in which organizations try to protect those internal operations regulated by law. This suggests that organizations are likely to substantively comply if symbolic compliance alone is insufficient. This conceptualization, however, cannot capture a radical response: organizations may stop interpreting legal demands or protecting their internal operatio…
Workplace Matters: The Use of Parental Leave Policy in Japan
Policies to render employment and family more compatible have been adopted in many postindustrial countries. But the organizational contexts that facilitate or hinder employees' policy usage have been underexamined. This article addresses this gap by analyzing the organizational conditions associated with greater use of parental leave policy in the workplace. The authors draw on organizational data from contemporary Japan, a setting that epitomiz…
Sex Typing of Jobs in Hiring: Evidence from Japan
I am grateful to Mary Brinton, Roberto Fernandez, and Peter Marsden for their valuable comments, thoughtful advice, and continuous support. I am especially indebted to Mary Brinton for generously allowing me to use her data for this study. I would also like to thank Jason
Policy Generosity, Employer Heterogeneity, and Women's Employment Opportunities: The Welfare State Paradox Reexamined
Scholars of comparative family policy research have raised concerns about potential negative outcomes of generous family policies, an issue known as the "welfare state paradox." They suspect that such policies will make employers reluctant to hire or promote women into high-authority jobs, because women are more likely than men to use those policies and take time off. Few studies, however, have directly tested this employer-side mechanism. In thi…
Workplace Matters: The Use of Parental Leave Policy in Japan
Policies to render employment and family more compatible have been adopted in many postindustrial countries. But the organizational contexts that facilitate or hinder employees' policy usage have been underexamined. This article addresses this gap by analyzing the organizational conditions associated with greater use of parental leave policy in the workplace. The authors draw on organizational data from contemporary Japan, a setting that epitomiz…
Occupations, workplaces or jobs: An exploration of stratification contexts using administrative data
Occupations have long been held by sociologists, from the older status attainment tradition to the more recent micro-class tradition, to be at the center of stratification writ large. Occupations are specifically argued to be central to shaping wages. Indeed, this has been understood as the comparative advantage of sociology relative to economics in understanding wage setting. However, an undercurrent has for decades existed in sociology that sug…
Between state and family: Managers' implementation and evaluation of parental leave policies in Japan
Work–family policies have been widely adopted in post-industrial societies. This paper brings the organizational level into the analysis of work–family policy effects on female employees. We theorize that managers' evaluation of female employees' use of parental leave is shaped not only by policy content, but also by labour market structure and the dominant cultural model of household gender relations. Using Japan as a case study, we analyse in-d…
Singlehood in contemporary Japan: Rating, dating, and waiting for a good match
BACKGROUND: Late age at marriage and rising rates of singlehood increasingly characterize East Asian societies. For Japan, these are major contributors to the very low birth rate. OBJECTIVE: We analyze two unique data sets: dating records covering a two-year period from one of Japan's largest marriage agencies and in-depth interviews with 30 highly-educated Japanese singles. The longitudinal nature of the quantitative data allows us to test hypot…
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of co…
Revisiting the welfare state paradox: A firm-level analysis from Japan
Workplace volatility and gender inequality: A comparison of the Netherlands and South Korea
Workplaces have become more unstable in recent decades, but how such instability shapes categorical inequalities remains little understood. This study explores how the rise of employment precarity, re-conceptualized as an attribute of workplaces, affects gender inequality. We argue that gender inequality increases in volatile workplaces where employee tenure is short and turnover is common. In such workplaces, gender stereotyping and opportunity …
Compensatory Work Devotion: How a Culture of Overwork Shapes Women's Parental Leave in South Korea
Despite growing concerns that parental leave policies may reinforce the marginalization of mothers in the labor market and reproduce the gendered division of household labor, few studies examine how women themselves approach and use parental leave. Through 64 in-depth interviews with college-educated Korean mothers, we find that although women's involvement in family responsibilities increases during leave, they do not reduce their work devotion …
Negative Compliance as an Organizational Response to Legal Pressures: The Case of Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Law
Scholars have conceptualized the interaction between law and organizations as a game of tug-of-war in which organizations try to protect those internal operations regulated by law. This suggests that organizations are likely to substantively comply if symbolic compliance alone is insufficient. This conceptualization, however, cannot capture a radical response: organizations may stop interpreting legal demands or protecting their internal operatio…
The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the au…
Ups and downs in finance, ups without downs in inequality
The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer-employee-linked data from 1990 to 2019 for 12 countries and data from bank reports, from 2009 to 2017 in 13 …
Changing employment relations under a fractured corporate elite
Shareholder power is often cited as contributing to the deterioration of employment relations. However, managerial power also shapes how shareholder pressures affect workers. In this article, we examine how managerial power contributed to the initial durability and eventual decline of white-collar benefits in the era of shareholder primacy. One traditional source of elite power is the network of overlapping board appointments which helped corpora…
Sex Typing of Jobs in Hiring: Evidence from Japan
I am grateful to Mary Brinton, Roberto Fernandez, and Peter Marsden for their valuable comments, thoughtful advice, and continuous support. I am especially indebted to Mary Brinton for generously allowing me to use her data for this study. I would also like to thank Jason
Negative Compliance as an Organizational Response to Legal Pressures: The Case of Japanese Equal Employment Opportunity Law
Scholars have conceptualized the interaction between law and organizations as a game of tug-of-war in which organizations try to protect those internal operations regulated by law. This suggests that organizations are likely to substantively comply if symbolic compliance alone is insufficient. This conceptualization, however, cannot capture a radical response: organizations may stop interpreting legal demands or protecting their internal operatio…
Workplace Matters: The Use of Parental Leave Policy in Japan
Policies to render employment and family more compatible have been adopted in many postindustrial countries. But the organizational contexts that facilitate or hinder employees' policy usage have been underexamined. This article addresses this gap by analyzing the organizational conditions associated with greater use of parental leave policy in the workplace. The authors draw on organizational data from contemporary Japan, a setting that epitomiz…
Revisiting the welfare state paradox: A firm-level analysis from Japan
Between state and family: Managers' implementation and evaluation of parental leave policies in Japan
Work–family policies have been widely adopted in post-industrial societies. This paper brings the organizational level into the analysis of work–family policy effects on female employees. We theorize that managers' evaluation of female employees' use of parental leave is shaped not only by policy content, but also by labour market structure and the dominant cultural model of household gender relations. Using Japan as a case study, we analyse in-d…
Too Few Women at the Top: The Persistence of Inequality in Japan
Policy Generosity, Employer Heterogeneity, and Women's Employment Opportunities: The Welfare State Paradox Reexamined
Scholars of comparative family policy research have raised concerns about potential negative outcomes of generous family policies, an issue known as the "welfare state paradox." They suspect that such policies will make employers reluctant to hire or promote women into high-authority jobs, because women are more likely than men to use those policies and take time off. Few studies, however, have directly tested this employer-side mechanism. In thi…
Occupations, workplaces or jobs: An exploration of stratification contexts using administrative data
Occupations have long been held by sociologists, from the older status attainment tradition to the more recent micro-class tradition, to be at the center of stratification writ large. Occupations are specifically argued to be central to shaping wages. Indeed, this has been understood as the comparative advantage of sociology relative to economics in understanding wage setting. However, an undercurrent has for decades existed in sociology that sug…
Rising between-workplace inequalities in high-income countries
Significance Understanding the causes of rising inequality is of concern in many countries. Using administrative data, we find that the share of inequality that is between workplaces is growing in 12 of 14 countries examined, and in no country has it fallen. Countries with declining employment protections see growth in both between- and within-workplace inequalities, but this impact is stronger for between-workplace inequalities. These results su…
Ampleur et évolution de la prime salariale financière
Nous mesurons l’ampleur et l’évolution de la prime salariale liée à un emploi en finance. Dans treize pays développés, les salaires, notamment les hauts salaires, ont augmenté dans ce secteur à un rythme soutenu pendant les années 1990 et 2000, contribuant fortement à l’augmentation de la part du top 1 % national et par conséquent aux inégalités. L’explication de cet écart par des différences de talent ne suffit pas à en rendre compte. En France,…
Changing employment relations under a fractured corporate elite
Shareholder power is often cited as contributing to the deterioration of employment relations. However, managerial power also shapes how shareholder pressures affect workers. In this article, we examine how managerial power contributed to the initial durability and eventual decline of white-collar benefits in the era of shareholder primacy. One traditional source of elite power is the network of overlapping board appointments which helped corpora…
Singlehood in contemporary Japan: Rating, dating, and waiting for a good match
BACKGROUND: Late age at marriage and rising rates of singlehood increasingly characterize East Asian societies. For Japan, these are major contributors to the very low birth rate. OBJECTIVE: We analyze two unique data sets: dating records covering a two-year period from one of Japan's largest marriage agencies and in-depth interviews with 30 highly-educated Japanese singles. The longitudinal nature of the quantitative data allows us to test hypot…
Meritocracy at Work: Merit-Based Reward Systems and Gender Wage Inequality
It is widely believed that meritocratic employment practices reduce gender inequality by limiting managers’ reliance on nonmerit factors, such as biases. An emerging stream of research, however, questions the belief, arguing that meritocratic practices often fail to reduce inequality and may paradoxically increase it. Despite these opposing predictions, we still lack convincing empirical findings to adjudicate between them. Typically relying on d…
Within-job gender pay inequality in 15 countries
Extant research on the gender pay gap suggests that men and women who do the same work for the same employer receive similar pay, so that processes sorting people into jobs are thought to account for the vast majority of the pay gap. Data that can identify women and men who do the same work for the same employer are rare, and research informing this crucial aspect of gender differences in pay is several decades old and from a limited number of co…
Workplace volatility and gender inequality: A comparison of the Netherlands and South Korea
Workplaces have become more unstable in recent decades, but how such instability shapes categorical inequalities remains little understood. This study explores how the rise of employment precarity, re-conceptualized as an attribute of workplaces, affects gender inequality. We argue that gender inequality increases in volatile workplaces where employee tenure is short and turnover is common. In such workplaces, gender stereotyping and opportunity …
Compensatory Work Devotion: How a Culture of Overwork Shapes Women's Parental Leave in South Korea
Despite growing concerns that parental leave policies may reinforce the marginalization of mothers in the labor market and reproduce the gendered division of household labor, few studies examine how women themselves approach and use parental leave. Through 64 in-depth interviews with college-educated Korean mothers, we find that although women's involvement in family responsibilities increases during leave, they do not reduce their work devotion …
Ups and downs in finance, ups without downs in inequality
The upswing in finance in recent decades has led to rising inequality, but do downswings in finance lead to a symmetric decline in inequality? We analyze the asymmetry of the effect of ups and downs in finance, and the effect of increased capital requirements and the bonus cap on national earnings inequality. We use administrative employer-employee-linked data from 1990 to 2019 for 12 countries and data from bank reports, from 2009 to 2017 in 13 …
Points of departure: Family leave policy and women’s representation in management in U.S. workplaces
This paper theorizes the interplay of public and organizational policies by investigating whether the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) shifted patterns of gender inequality within U.S. workplaces. Did this leave law increase women’s representation in positions of authority (moving more women into management jobs)? We argue that the impact of public policies will vary by organizational context, hypothesizing different effects by organizations’ …
The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the au…
Beyond individual performance: Collective performance pay and gender wage inequality
Pay-for-performance systems are a defining feature of contemporary workplaces, yet their implications for inequality remain unclear. This paper examines how collective performance pay—where rewards are tied to team-, department-, or firm-level outcomes—shapes gender wage inequality through relational processes of reward distribution. Using linked employer–employee data on 21,339 full-time white-collar employees across 660 South Korean firms betwe…
Dualization of corporate control: Lifetimers, external appointees, and CEO succession in Japan
We investigate mechanisms of institutional stability under profound environmental change, using corporate control in Japan as a critical case. Building on the concept of dualization in the comparative institutions literature, we theorize how dualized power relations at the top of the firm sustain insider control. Using data on executive board members of all non-financial firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange from 1993 to 2016, we show that “li…
Economics (19 works) · Labour economics (14 works) · Demographic economics (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Gender Diversity and Inequality (8 works) · Inequality (8 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (8 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (8 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Sociology (7 works)