Young statistician’s grant awarded to Papuna Gogoladze

Papuna Gogoladze defended his master’s thesis “Gender Income Gap over Life-cycle: Cross-country Analysis” in quantitative economics at the School of Economics and Business Administration, University of Tartu. The aim of the thesis was to analyse the gender income gap across various age groups in Europe. The data of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey of 2016 has been used in the research. The analysis covers 23 European Union and two non-EU countries, and the results can be extended to population aged 16 and over. The thesis was completed within the framework of the project funded by the European Commission – “InWeGe – Income, Wealth and Gender”.

According to Tuulikki Sillajõe, the chair of the grant committee and Deputy Director General at Statistics Estonia, 11 papers were submitted for the competition. “It was difficult to make the choice this year because 4–5 top papers were all about exciting topics and equally good, so the final results were also very close,” Sillajõe said.

The supervisors of the thesis were Jaanika Meriküll and Jaan Masso from the University of Tartu. Jaanika Meriküll noted that the topic of the thesis is rather novel – the gender pay gap has been studied a lot, but there are much less studies on the gender gap in total income. “The policy relevance of the topic cannot be underestimated in a country with the largest gender wage gap in Europe, in Estonia. The topic was complicated to analyse, as we suggested to cover individual data of many countries, in order to analyse the various aspects of gender income gap across various age groups, income categories and the effects over the distribution of income,” Meriküll explained.

Papuna Gogoladze’s thesis is available on Statistics Estonia’s website. The winner will be awarded a 500 euro gift voucher.  

Albert Pullerits was the first director of the Estonian State Central Bureau of Statistics (established in 1921) and the founder of the official statistics system in Estonia. The Albert Pullerits young statistician’s grant was first awarded by Statistics Estonia in 2011, to celebrate the 90th anniversary of Estonian statistics.