Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality: Assessing the Role of Reallocation

Fredrik W. Andersson (), Elizabeth Davis, Matthew Freedman, Julia Lane, Brian McCall and Kristin Sandusky
Additional contact information
Fredrik W. Andersson: Statistics Sweden

No 6182, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper exploits longitudinal employer-employee matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in earnings inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that factors that cannot be measured using standard cross-sectional data, including the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers across firms, are important sources of changes in earnings distributions over time. Our results also suggest that the dynamics driving changes in earnings inequality are heterogeneous across industries.

Keywords: inequality; linked employer-employee data; sorting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J0 J30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2011-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6182.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality: Assessing the Role of Reallocation (2012)
Working Paper: Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality: Assessing the Role of Reallocation (2010)
Working Paper: Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality Assessing the Role of Reallocation
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6182

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().