Beyond Oaxaca-Blinder: Accounting for Differences in Household Income Distributions

• Tác giả: Francois Bourguignon
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 339.2 Distribution of income and wealth
• Thông tin xuất bản: 2012
• Bộ sưu tập: Tài liệu truy cập mở
• ID: 293824
• Chủ đề: 1. Economic Development: Human Resources; 2. Human Development; 3. Income Distribution; 4. Measurement and Analysis of Poverty I320; 5. Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions D310

Tóm tắt

 This paper develops a method to decompose differences across distributions of household income, based on counterfactual distributions that 'lie between' the actually observed distributions. Our approach decomposes differences between any two income distributions (or functionals such as inequality or poverty measures) into shares due to price effects
  occupational structure effects
  and endowment effects. Comparing the household income distributions of the USA and Brazil in 1999, we find that most of Brazil's excess inequality (of 13 Gini points) is accounted for by underlying inequalities in the distributions of education and of non-labor income, notably pensions (between four and six Gini points each). Steeper returns to education in Brazil also make an important contribution (of two to five points). Differences in occupational structure and in racial and demographic composition are much less important.