What accounts for the rising share of women in the top 1 percent?

Richard Burkhauser, Nicolas Hérault, Stephen Jenkins and Roger Wilkins ()

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The share of women in the top 1 percent of the UK’s income distribution has been growing over the last two decades (as in several other countries). Our first contribution is to account for this trend using regressions of the probability of being in the top 1 percent, fitted separately for men and women, in order to contrast between the sexes the role of changes in characteristics and changes in returns to characteristics. We show that the rise of women in the top 1 percent is primarily accounted for by their greater increases in the number of years spent in full-time education. Although most top income analysis uses tax return data, we derive our findings taking advantage of the much more extensive information about personal characteristics that is available in survey data. Our use of survey data requires justification given survey under-coverage of top incomes. Providing this justification is our second contribution.

Keywords: top 1%; top incomes; inequality; gender differences; survey under-coverage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 D31 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2023-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
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Published in Review of Income and Wealth, 1, March, 2023, 69(1), pp. 1 - 33. ISSN: 0034-6586

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Journal Article: What Accounts for the Rising Share of Women in the Top 1 percent? (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:111872

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