The evolution of the earnings distribution in Italy between 1986 and 2004: evidence from the WHIP database

Alfonso Rosolia

Politica economica, 2010, issue 2, 179-202

Abstract: Over the past 20 years the Italian labour market has experienced several institutional changes and socio-demographic developments. This paper explores how such changes have affected the distribution of private not agricultural earnings using longitudinal administrative records collected in the Working Histories Italian Panel (WHIP). First, we show that the decline in average yearly earnings begun in the second half of the nineties largely reflects the shortening of employment spells; weekly earnings have remained substantially constant instead. Weekly earning have become more compressed at the lower end of the distribution and more unequal at the top end, mostly reflecting the developments of the decade 1986-95. Over the entire period, earnings growth along the distribution is primarily traceable to changes in earnings differentials by sex, age, citizenship, location rather than to the changes in employment composition.

Keywords: earnings distribution; composition effects; quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1429/32532 (application/pdf)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1429/32532 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:mul:je8794:doi:10.1429/32532:y:2010:i:2:p:179-202

Access Statistics for this article

Politica economica is currently edited by Giuseppe Marotta

More articles in Politica economica from Società editrice il Mulino
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().