What Accounts for the Rising Share of Women in the Top 1%?

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

No 13359, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The share of women in the top 1% 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 secular change using regressions of the probability of being in the top 1%, 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% is primarily accounted for by their greater increases (relative to men) 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: survey under-coverage; Top 1%; top incomes; inequality; gender differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 D31 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Review of Income and Wealth, 2023, 69 (1), 1 - 33

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Related works:
Working Paper: What accounts for the rising share of women in the top 1%? (2020)
Working Paper: What accounts for the rising share of women in the top 1\%? (2020)
Working Paper: What Accounts for the Rising Share of Women in the Top 1%? (2020)
Working Paper: What Accounts for the Rising Share of Women in the Top 1%? (2020)
Working Paper: What accounts for the rising share of women in the top 1%? (2020)
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