The Atlantic Economic Journal (AEJ) is pleased to announce that the winners of the 2021 Best Article Award are Luiza Antonie, Laura Gatto, and Miana Plesca, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Their paper entitled, “Full-Time and Part-Time Work and the Gender Wage Gap,” appeared in the September 2020 issue of the AEJ. The AEJ Best Article Award committee reviewed all eligible papers (those with ratings of top 25% or better) published in 2020. The committee was chaired by International Atlantic Economic Society (IAES) Vice President, Dimitri Vayanos, Director of the Financial Markets Group and Director of the Paul Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, London School of Economics. Members of the committee included the AEJ Board of Editors and IAES Endowment Fund sponsors. The Managing Editor gratefully acknowledges the participation and diligence of all committee members who participated in the review process. The award emphasizes the intellectual and scholarly approach to economic research which has always been a focal point of the AEJ. A brief summary of the award-winning paper follows.

The aim of the Antonie et al. (2020) study was to reexamine the gender pay gap in Canada, defined as the disparity between the amount that women are paid compared to men. The novelty of the study was inclusion of both full-time and part-time workers in the analysis. According to the authors, much of the gender wage gap literature excluded part-time workers likely because the gender-wage gap was believed to be negligible in this group.

Canadian Labour Force Survey data restricted to March for each of the 19 years spanning 2000–2018 were used to identify the sample of individuals 15–64 years of age who were not currently enrolled in school. Working full-time was defined as working at least 30 hours per week, with 35 hours per week examined in sensitivity analysis. Job characteristics considered in the analysis included tenure, precarious employment indicators (e.g., seasonal worker), working multiple jobs or extra hours, public sector work and a union indicator. Both regression analysis and a Blinder-Oaxaca parametric wage decomposition were conducted to facilitate identification of differences between the full-time and part-time groups.

The primary finding was that the overall gender wage gap is larger than either the full-time pay gap or the part-time pay gap, even after controlling for personal and job characteristics and for selection into full-time and part-time work. According to the authors, this result is readily explained by two other findings. First, part-time wages were lower than full-time wages. Second, the majority of part-time workers were women and particularly women of higher earnings potential. To reduce the gender wage gap, the authors recommend policies targeted at encouraging full-time employment for women throughout their lifecycle, such as flexible work arrangements and work-family friendly policies, and the need for research to assess the effect of such policies on labor supply patterns and the gender wage gap.