are estimates of earnings inequality sensitive to measurement choices a case study of canada in the 1980s while it is necessary that researchers make choices in order to estimate inequality the reasons for the measurement choices and their impact on inequality estimates have not been widely assessed this paper uses canadian data from the 1980s to analyse whether inequality estimates are sensitive to common measurement choices seemingly minor technical choices about the treatment of outlying observations such as the use of top income coded data exclusion of very high and low observations and differences among data sets in the capture of very high observations affect estimates of inequality further the impact of the treatment of outlying observations on inequality estimates are at least as large as the impact of measurement choices of a conceptual nature such as the income definition and population selection the sensitivity of inequality estimates to measurement choices which often remain invisible affect inferences about the relative degree of inequality at a given point in time among countries and

does the market for women s labor need fixing t he difference in pay between men and women workers in the american economy is currently averaging 30 to 35 percent depending on the measure used underlying these large pay differences are the continuing segregation of work by sex a sparsity of promotions for women and differences in the respect accorded men and women low wages for women workers mean a low standard of living for the large and growing fraction of women who do not share the income of a husband and for the children who live with them because of their lack of access to all jobs on an equal basis women have a disproportionately small share of the interesting jobs of the jobs that allow a person to grow and to advance gains for working women are occurring but even assuming the continuation of the current rate of change the substantial equality of women and men in the labor market is decades away this article concerns the appropriate policy response to this situation some economists imply that the appropriate response is none at all they view the inferior labor market position of women as something women have freely chosen as a normal and generally benign adaptation to their responsibilities for housework and child rearing low wage work is seen as appropriate for people who behave as they do the laws against discrimination and the apparatus designed to enforce them are in this view superfluous or of minor value after all the discipline of the competitive marketplace has kept things fair and always will there is however considerable evidence for the alternative view that widespread severe ongoing discrimination by employers and fellow workers continues to hamper women if this is true systematic government action to interfere in the marketplace can be justified on grounds of equity and efficiency the question then arises as to the

recent trends in the uk income distribution what happened and why the uk income distribution changed its shape dramatically during the 1980s this paper documents the trends and analyses their causes copyright 1996 by oxford university press

is there a glass ceiling over europe exploring the gender pay gap across the wages distribution using harmonised data from the european union household panel we analyse gender pay gaps by sector across the wages distribution for ten countries we find that the mean gender pay gap in the raw data typically hides large variations in the gap across the wages distribution we use quantile regression qr techniques to control for the effects of individual and job characteristics at different points of the distribution and calculate the part of the gap attributable to differing returns between men and women we find that first gender pay gaps are typically bigger at the top of the wage distribution a finding that is consistent with the existence of glass ceilings for some countries gender pay gaps are also bigger at the bottom of the wage distribution a finding that is consistent with sticky floors third the gender pay gap is typically higher at the top than the bottom end of the wage distribution suggesting that glass ceilings are more prevalent than sticky floors and that these prevail in the majority of our countries fourth the gender pay gap differs significantly across the public and the private sector wages distribution for each of our eu countries

urban rural income polarization and economic growth in china evidence from the analysis of a dynamic panel data model using a dynamic panel data model and the system gmm this article examines the relationship between urban rural income polarization and economic growth at the provincial level in the period 1995 to 2010 in china the estimated results and significant tests indicate that a certain degree of urban rural income polarization is beneficial to economic growth at the provincial level in both stages for china as a whole though the contribution of urban rural income polarization to economic growth is relatively small aggravating urban rural income polarization has a negative impact on economic growth in china based on a cluster analysis of regional economic growth at the provincial level the authors carried out the same analysis separately for two categories of regions too the results for those two categories of regions show that positive correlations also exist between urban rural income polarization and economic growth in both stages which are very similar to the analysis for the whole of china in additio

income distribution human capital and economic growth in colombia abstract colombian income distribution has followed a clear path during the last two decades in the second half of the 1970s human capital accumulation reduced the dispersion of income distribution and lead to a period of stagnation between 1983 and 1990 when mobility declined after the structural reforms a skill bias technological change the wage differential for skilled workers increased inequality by a polarization in the bi modal distribution of income these topics are discussed in the paper along some dynamic aspects of income and educational mobility in colombia

prejudice and wages an empirical assessment of becker s the economics of discrimination we test the predictions from becker s 1957 seminal work on employer prejudice and find that relative black wages a vary negatively with the prejudice of the marginal white in a state b vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice distribution but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most prejudiced persons in a state and c vary negatively with the fraction of a state that is black our estimates suggest that one quarter of the racial wage gap is due to prejudice with nontrivial consequences for black lifetime earnings

the impact of segregation and sorting on the gender wage gap evidence from german linked longitudinal employer employee data for this study the author inspects the relationship between segregation in the workplace measured as the proportion female in job cells and the gender wage gap using linked longitudinal employer employee data from the german employment register he extends the literature by controlling for nonrandom sorting of workers into job cells establishments and occupations in line with previous studies the pooled least squares estimates show that the gender wage gap increases as the job cell level proportion of females increases this increase is attributable to the fact that women experience greater wage declines than men do when additional women enter their job cells controlling additionally for unobserved heterogeneity at the individual establishment occupation and job cell levels considerably reduces the size of the proportion female effects on women s wages while rendering the effects on men s wages insignificant or even positive the same controls also significantly decrease the proportion effects on the wage gap the related sorting analysis shows that a good deal of the proportion effects can be explained by unobserved individual ability and suggests that especially women working in job cells with small proportions of females show above average unobserved individual ability

testing the significance of income distribution changes over the 1980s business cycle a cross national comparison using kernel density estimation we describe the distribution of household size adjusted real income and how it changed over the business cycle of the 1980s in the united states and the united kingdom we confirm previous studies that show income inequality increased in the two countries and the middle of the distribution was squashed down using a series of statistical tests however we find that while the mass in both tails of the distribution increased significantly in both countries over the period by far the greatest gains were in the upper tail copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

does income polarization affect economic growth the case of the european regions ezcurra r does income polarization affect economic growth the case of the european regions regional studies this paper examines the relationship between income polarization and economic growth in the regions of the european union over the period 1993 2003 the results indicate that the level of income polarization is negatively associated with regional growth this finding is in fact robust to various alternative specifications including a number of additional explanatory variables such as initial per capita gross domestic product industry mix human capital stock population density or market potential furthermore it should be noted that the observed negative correlation between polarization and economic performance does not depend on the number of groups used to analyse the degree of income stratification within the sample regions ezcurra r la polarisation des revenus affecte t elle la croissance economique le cas des regions europeennes regional studies cet article etudie les relations en

breaking the glass ceiling the effect of board quotas on female labor market outcomes in norway in late 2003 norway passed a law mandating 40 representation of each gender on the board of public limited liability companies the primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease the gender disparity in earnings within that sector we document that the women appointed to these boards post reform were observably more qualified than their female predecessors along many dimensions and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially however we see no robust evidence that the reform benefited the larger set of women employed in the companies subject to the quota moreover the reform had no clear impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards finally we find mixed support for the view that the reform affected the decisions of young women while the reform was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programmes we do see some improvements in labour market outcomes for young women with graduate business degrees in their early career stages however we observe similar improvements for young women with graduate science degrees suggesting this may not be due to the reform overall seven years after the board quota policy fully came into effect we conclude that it had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the women who made it into boardrooms

a sticky floors model of promotion pay and gender abstract according to raw data from the british household panel survey full time women are more likely than men to be promoted controlling for observed and unobserved individual heterogeneity we find that women are promoted at roughly the same rate as men but may receive smaller wage increases consequent upon promotion to help explain these phenomena we construct a new sticky floors model of pay and promotion in our model women are just as likely as men to be promoted but find themselves stuck at the bottom of the wage scale for the new grade

part time wage penalties for women in prime age a matter of selection or segregation evidence from four european countries using the european union statistics on income and living conditions data for the year 2009 the authors evaluate how vertical and horizontal job segregation explains the differential between full t

in search of the glass ceiling gender and earnings growth among u s college graduates in the 1990s gender typical educational choices and the glass ceiling are widely believed to explain why older women earn far less than observably similar men using large panels drawn from the national science foundation s nsf national survey of college graduates and other data representative of u s college graduates from the 1990s the author documents the small role of personal choices and finds evidence contrary to the predictions of both human capital and discrimination models rather than the differential wage growth rates predicted by these models she finds similar average rates of earnings growth for women and men across numerous specifications which suggests that the gender gap in earnings is determined by factors already present early in the career her findings reveal slower earnings growth in only two subsets of women young mothers who experience slower earnings growth during the early career relative to men the same age but then compensate with faster growth later in their careers and women wit

evidence on discrimination in employment codes of color codes of gender there is substantial racial and gender disparity in the american economy as we will demonstrate discriminatory treatment within the labor market is a major cause of this inequality the evidence is ubiquitous careful research studies that estimate wage and employment regressions help wanted advertisements audit and correspondence studies and discrimination suits that are often reported by the news media yet there appear to have been periods of substantial reductions in economic disparity and discrimination for example donohue and heckman provide evidence that racial discrimination declined during 1965 1975 1 gottschalk has produced statistical estimates that indicate that discrimination against black males dropped most sharply between 1965 and 1975 and that discrimination against women declined during the interval 1973 1994 2 but some unanswered questions remain why did the movement toward racial equality stagnate and eventually decline after the mid 1970s what factors are most responsible for the remaining gender inequality what is the role of the competitive process in the elimination or reproduction of discrimination in employment

poverty in america 1970 1990 who did gain ground an application of stochastic dominance criteria employing simultaneous inequality tests in a partial panel atkinson 1987 proposed stochastic dominance criteria for analysing poverty which under certain conditions establish orderings of states for any poverty line and any poverty measure within given class refocusing debate on the nature of the income distribution of the poor employing new empirical techniques these criteria are implemented for the united states from 1970 to 1990 using the panel study of income dynamics results highlight the pivotal role of family size scale economies in consumption indicate different experiences for white versus non white groups and suggest that optimism over the progress of the poor is not warranted copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

do employer preferences contribute to sticky floors the authors investigate the importance of employer preferences in explaining sticky floors the pattern in which women are less likely as compared to men to start to climb the job ladder the authors perform a randomized field experiment in the belgian labor market and test whether hiring discrimination based on gender is heterogeneous by whether jobs imply a promotion compared to the applicants current position the findings show that women receive 33 fewer interview invitations when they apply for jobs that imply a first promotion at the functional level by contrast the results show that their hiring chances are not significantly affected by the authority level of the job

inequality and poverty in united states the effects of rising dispersion of men s earnings and changing family behaviour using semiparametric density estimation techniques we analyse the effect of rising dispersion of men s earnings and related changes in family behaviour on increasing inequality in the distribution of family income in the united states for the period 1969 1989 the growing dispersion of men s earnings and changing family structure can account for most of the rise in family income inequality by contrast the increase in labour force participation by women offset this trend inequality grew at a slower rate in the 1990s than in earlier decades largely because of stabilization in the relative earnings of men from low income families

is there less discrimination in occupations where recruitment is difficult the authors empirically test the cross sectional relationship between hiring discrimination and labor market tightness at the level of the occupation to this end they conduct a correspondence tes

does additional campaign spending really hurt incumbents the theoretical importance of past investments in political brand name the existing literature ignores the fact that the marginal return to current campaign expenditures depends on the candidate s stock of brand name this simple observation is then used to provide a possible explanation for the negative empirical relationship observed between an incumbent s campaign spending and how well he does