Accounting for Income Distribution Trends: A Density Function Decomposition Approach

Stephen Jenkins and Philippe Van Kerm

No 1141, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper develops methods for decomposing changes in the income distribution using subgroup decompositions of the income density function. Overall changes are related to changes in subgroup shares and changes in subgroup densities, where the latter are broken down further using elementary transformations of individual incomes. These density decompositions are analogous to the widely-used decompositions of inequality indices by population subgroup, except that they summarize multiple features of the income distribution (using graphs), rather than focusing on a specific feature such as dispersion, and are not dependent on the choice of a specific summary index. Nonetheless, since inequality and poverty indices can be expressed as PDF functionals, our density-based methods can also be used to provide numerical decompositions of these. An application of the methods reveals the multi-faceted nature of UK income distribution trends during the 1980s.

Keywords: density functions; inequality; income distribution; subgroup decompositions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 D31 D33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2004-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Inequality, 2005, 3(1), 43–61

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Related works:
Journal Article: Accounting for income distribution trends: A density function decomposition approach (2005)
Working Paper: Accounting for income distribution trends: a density function decomposition approach (2004)
Working Paper: Accounting for income distribution trends: A density function decomposition approach (2004)
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