Mobility and Gender at the Top Tail of the Earnings Distribution

Ross Finnie () and Ian Irvine ()

The Economic and Social Review, 2006, vol. 37, issue 2, 149-173

Abstract: The increasing share of the top fractile in the earnings distributions of several Anglo- Saxon heritage economies since the 1970s has been dramatic, and well documented. To date, however, little is known about the socio-economic origins and gender composition of the very top tail in the modern era. This paper takes a first step in filling some of the holes in our knowledge. We use a tax-filer data base for Canada for the period 1983-2003 that contains about eighty million observations. We show first that male earners in the top one thousandth of the distribution come very disproportionately from families with incomes in the top decile. In contrast, individuals in the remaining part of the top centile have more dispersed socio-economic origins. Second we show that female participation in the top fractiles has been very low, and that growth in participation has been slow yet definite. In contrast, female earnings in this echelon are almost on par with male earnings. Third, we show that there is an enormous asymmetry between the genders when it comes to spousal earnings: high-earning women have very high-earning spouses, but not vice versa. ‘Secondary males’ have earnings levels almost ten times as high as ‘secondary females’, suggesting that, even at this extremely elevated earnings level there is truth to the adage about who lies ‘behind’ successful individuals. Finally, it is illustrated that the earnings concentration that has characterised the last three decades did not change with the end of the ‘tech boom’ in the year 2000.

Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.esr.ie/Vol37_2/02_finnie_article.pdf First version, 2006 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:eso:journl:v:37:y:2006:i:2:p:149-173

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Economic and Social Review from Economic and Social Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Aedin Doris ().