 Earnings inequality over the life-course in South AfricaUniversity of CapeTown Rocco Zizzamia and University of CapeTown Vimal Ranchhod Working Paper from Agence française de développement Abstract: Earnings inequality is usually calculated from a distribution which is measured at a point in time. However, because we typically observe a positive age earnings profile, a part of cross sectional inequality is explained by age-related differences in earnings across age cohorts. When inequality is computed using earnings measured over the lifetime, these age-specific differences are averaged out. However, there are also factors that may drive up inequality in earnings measured over time relative to cross-sectional inequality for instance, low cross-sectional earnings are likely to be correlated with low wage growth and longer spells of unemployment, thereby compounding inequality. Using South African data, we investigate how these dynamic processes act simultaneously but over different time scales to both moderate and exacerbate inequality over time. Because the available panel data in South Africa spans only nine years, straightforwardly constructing a measure of lifetime earnings is not possible. We circumnavigate this challenge by constructing a synthetic lifetime panel by stitching together relevantly similar individuals across successive age cohorts. Keywords: Afrique; du; Sud (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in Research Papers Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:avg:wpaper:en11634 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Paper from Agence française de développement Contact information at EDIRC. |
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