Wage Distribution in Japan: 1989-2003

Ryo Kambayashi (), Daiji Kawaguchi and Izumi Yokoyama ()

Hi-Stat Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: Diverging economic inequality has become a common focus of economic debate in developed countries. In particular, the recent experience of Japan has started attracting international attention. We take advantage of a rich micro-level data set from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (1989-2003) to perform an in-depth analysis of the change in the inequality and distribution of the hourly wage. We observe that lower returns to education and years of tenure contribute to diminishing income disparity between groups for both sexes. A larger variance within a group contributes to the wage disparity for males, while an increased heterogeneity of workers' attributes contributes to the wage disparity for females. The Dinardo, Fortin, and Lemieux decomposition also confirms the basic findings from a parametric variance decomposition.

Keywords: Wage Distribution; Wage Equation; Variance Decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-ltv and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hi-stat.ier.hit-u.ac.jp/research/discussion/2006/pdf/D06-183.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Wage distribution in Japan, 1989-2003 (2008)
Journal Article: Wage distribution in Japan, 1989–2003 (2008)
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:hst:hstdps:d06-183

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Hi-Stat Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tatsuji Makino ().