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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of self‐assessed health on retirement plans of older migrants living in France. As immigration is primarily associated with labor considerations, the role of economic incentives in the migration decision suggests that health could play a minor effect in immigrants’ decision to retire.

Using detailed data on immigrants living in France collected in 2003, the authors examine the role of health on early retirement intentions using simultaneous, recursive models that account for the fact that subjective health is potentially endogenous.

It is found that being in poor health increases the intention of migrant workers to retire early, but the subjective health outcomes have little influence on retirement plans.

Since subjective health outcomes have less influence on retirement plan than economic variables, migrants may have incentives to postpone their retirement decisions in order to avoid an excessive pension reduction.

Knowing the relative contribution of health variables and economic factors in the context of migration is a challenging issue since in almost all industrialized countries, the proportion of migrants having retired or nearing retirement has increased substantially. The authors’ analysis is the first contribution to study the role of health on retirement intentions of older migrants.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relevance of the glass ceiling effect, according to which the gender log wage gap accelerates in the upper tail of the wage distribution, at the firm level.

The empirical analysis is based on a sample of 4,654 employees, working in a French private company from the Defence and Aerospace sector. Quantile wage regressions were used to study whether a glass ceiling effect exits at the firm level. The difference between the male and female wage distributions is also decomposed into two components, one due to differences in labour market characteristics between men and women and one due to differences in rewards to these individual characteristics.

It was found that the gender wage gap measured through OLS is quite low, less than 8 per cent when controlling for age, experience, qualification and location. It remains rather flat along the wage distribution, a result which casts doubt on the glass ceiling theory. The gender gap is mainly due to differences in labour market characteristics rather than to differences in the rewards of these characteristics, especially among executives. Finally, women face a lower probability of reaching higher hierarchical positions within the firm.

Taking into account firm effects matters when measuring the magnitude of the gender wage throughout the wage gap distribution.

This paper presents original estimates of the gender wage gap with an unusual, firm‐based sample of workers.