The integration of youngsters and females in the Portuguese labor market oen puzzles analysts. The most qualified generations the country has ever raised are nowadays entering the labor market. Yet one-fih of all university graduates below age 30 are paid at the national minimum wage. Moreover, the recent renewal of the Portuguese emigration outflow is overwhelmingly composed of highly educated youngsters. Also puzzling is the fact that Portugal has a high female labor force participation and females nowadays comprise almost 60% of university graduates in science, maths and computing. Nevertheless, the gender pay gap is not particularly low, being around the OECD average. This project focuses on labor market trajectories over the lifecycle, to analyze how wage progression is determined by the interaction of educational choices, labor market institutions (the minimum wage and collective bargaining) and company recruitment and pay policies. We will start by comparing occupational choices and associated lifecycle wage profiles across generations over three decades. We aim to rank occupations, from fast-track to dead-end ones, and show how this classification has evolved over birth cohorts. We will quantify the impact of occupational segregation on pay dispersion in the context of changing occupational profiles and high female labor force participation. Subsequently, we will concentrate on youngsters and females during the last decade. We will start from the existing aggregate figures on youth brain drain from Portugal, to identify the major destination countries. Using data at destination countries, we will address the questions: What was the gender composition of the recent brain drain? What are those young skilled Portuguese working on? How does their pay compare to that of other immigrants and natives at destination? Back to Portugal, we are particularly interested in the causal impact of the feminization of an occupation on its labor market valuation, focusing on STEM-related fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Different policies nowadays aim at motivating women to enter STEM under the assumption that wages will not react to the feminization of the occupation. We will test this assumption. We will exploit exogenous variation across cohorts, regions, and over time in the share of females in the occupations of interest, by combining labor market and education data. We will also characterize patterns of occupational mobility, to test the hypothesis that females are more likely to move down the occupational ladder. We will further investigate the role of institutions versus market forces in driving wage dispersion over the last decade, focusing on the national minimum wage, collective bargaining (CB), and firm policies. Employer policies adjust wages to firm conditions and to the business cycle beyond the floors set in CB. The initial studies on CB date back several decades and they concentrated on Anglo-Saxon countries. The field is currently emerging as a lively area of research, under the combined interest of policymakers, the availability of rich longitudinal microdata, and innovative research questions of relevance across countries. We will develop recent work by team members Card and Cardoso on the margins of flexibility under sectoral bargaining in Continental Europe. We will go a step further, relying on more recent data, to compare different business cycle phases and test hypotheses put forth in the theoretical literature. The project will rely mostly on empirical microeconomic modelling, using some of the richest datasets worldwide: (i) linked employer-employee data on the population of workers and firms; (ii) firm financial records; (iii) CB jobs’ wage floors; (iv) higher education data on the population of candidates, enrolled students, and graduates. Propelled by rich panel data, we will rely on instrumental-variable and regressiondiscontinuity designs to perform our analysis. The analysis of the Portuguese labor market is of general interest, as the project fits perfectly into the following UN 2030 Agenda Goals: 10 on the reduction of inequalities, 4 on education, and 5 on gender. There is widespread concern over the concentration of career opportunities in a narrow set of sectors, firms, and workers. There is also concern over the rising share of national incomes going to capital to the detriment of labor, possibly due to rising product market concentration and the decline in CB (S12, BBK20). As a result, there is a general call for sustained investment in human capital, and better policies and institutions to promote more equitable access to resources (see the European Pillar of Social Rights or the proposed EU Collective Bargaining and Wage Directive). The links between investment in human capital, institutions, market forces, and inequality are precisely the focus of our proposal. It addresses the concern that widening inequalities pose a threat to social cohesion.