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In emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs), entrepreneurship and self-employment, particularly among women, play a pivotal role as a means of livelihood. Unfortunately, the share of women participating in these activities is significantly lower compared to men, which has a negative effect on both the development of these countries and gender equality. Usual programs that support women's entrepreneurship are costly. We aim to explore the role of social networks for the entrepreneurial entry of women in EMDEs, as women can 'help themselves' through their development and activation. Our results, using GEM data for 53 low- and middle-income countries for the period 2011–2018, revealed that an entrepreneur on the women's social network increases the probability of their entrepreneurial entry by 3.3 percentage points. Our results also suggest that social networks represent an important source of information that enhances the determination of women to take advantage of good business opportunities, increases the positive effect of self-assessed start-up skills on entrepreneurial entry, and raises awareness of business risks. Based on these results (confirmed by robustness and causality checks), we can recommend supporting networking between entrepreneurs and women by targeted policy measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distance a person is willing to commute has a direct influence on her/his employment opportunities and wage level. It raises a lot of interesting questions, especially whether intra-urban commuting (due to a well-developed transport infrastructure, geographical concentration of job opportunities, etc.) is connected with any wage returns, and how they differ in comparison with those of inter-urban commuting. This article uses three data-sets at national (N1 = 1,884; N2 = 933) and local (N3 = 3,193) levels from the Czech Republic, and different approximations of commuting in order to contribute to the discussion. It provides robust evidence on positive wage returns to both inter-urban and intra-urban commuting, comparable with Western countries. The differences between large national and limited urban labour markets are reflected in functional form: wage returns are linear for intra-urban and non-linear for inter-urban commuting. The article also explores the validity of different measures of commuting time and distance provided by the on-line application Mapy.cz, and suggests that it represents a suitable approximation in the case of missing or limited data.

Finding a job is easier for people who are better equipped with soft skills, as they are more productive. Therefore, this article deals with the evaluation of soft skills of graduates from Czech public universities. The results show that the same soft skills are required from university graduates as from the population as a whole (only problem solving is more pronounced with them), but the required level of these skills is 42% higher in the case of graduates. Unfortunately, employers perceive the level of graduates’ soft skills insufficient as their level is by 16.46 to 31.15% lower than required. A more detailed analysis showed that, in terms of the development of soft skills, Czech universities provide a very homogenous service. Graduates of universities have nearly the same level of soft skills, while they can also identify similar strengths and weaknesses. These findings suggest that Czech universities should pay more attention to the systematic development of soft skills.

Using data from a unique survey of employees in the Czech Republic, this paper analyzes the relationship between gender-role attitudes and the male-female wage gap while controlling for observable characteristics such as work experience, education, family factors, and job characteristics. The analysis focuses on five factors representing gender-role attitudes that have not been systematically explored in the literature: preferred responsibility for income, preferred responsibility for household chores and child care, life priorities (career, family, others), preference for job flexibility, and prioritizing less demanding and stressful jobs over higher wages. The results demonstrate that in the Czech Republic, traditional gender-role attitudes are significantly correlated with wages and explain a significant part of the gender wage gap. To be effective, policies aiming to promote gender equality in the labor market need to take the prevailing gender norms into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a modest but growing empirical body of evidence on the influence of managers' gender on the wages of their male and female subordinates. Most of these studies, however, suffer from a very raw approximation of the managers' gender by the share of women in charge, and often lack many important gender‐specific personal characteristics, such as non‐cognitive skills and life–work preferences, which can lead to biased results. This article copes with the mentioned deficiencies by employing a very rich and representative dataset of 1948 employees from the Czech Republic. It reveals surprising results as it shows that the gender of the manager has an effect on the level of wages, but not on the gender wage gap. It also shows that the gender of the manager and his/her subordinate has only a weak impact on the remuneration of an employee´s non‐cognitive skills and life–work preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An employability of individuals became dependent not only on their qualification, but also on their soft skills. Therefore, this paper tries to examine an importance of soft competencies for Romanian labour market and evaluate gap between soft competencies of graduates and unemployed registered at Employment Offices and employers' requirements. The survey among 277 employers (representing 36,268 employees) was realized in 7 NUTS-3 regions of Romania in March 2011 to ensure relevant information. The results shows the necessity of development of competencies for customer orientation, efficiency, problem solving, effective communication and planning and organizing, which are simultaneously the most important for work performance and the least developed. This output represents an important input for an adaptation of current formal education curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]