IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/socsci/v102y2021i4p1534-1552.html

What About the Rest of the Pie? A Dynamic Compositional Approach to Modeling Inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Ali Kagalwala
  • Andrew Q. Philips
  • Guy D. Whitten

Abstract

Objective To demonstrate how a novel method enhances our understanding of determinants of inequality. Methods We take advantage of recent advances in dynamic models of compositional dependent variables to simultaneously study tradeoffs across multiple slices of the composition of income in the United States between 1947 and 2014. Results Our analyses demonstrate the utility of dynamic compositional models of income shares. Factors that increase the income share of the top income group often also increase the income share of the second income group and decrease the shares of lower groups at different rates. Polarization and marginal tax rates have large effects on relative income shares, while returns to labor, returns to capital, and partisan control of Congress have smaller, but statistically significant effects. Conclusion Our suggested approach allows researchers to effectively explore interesting variation across multiple income groups in response to changes in determinants of inequality.

Suggested Citation

  • Ali Kagalwala & Andrew Q. Philips & Guy D. Whitten, 2021. "What About the Rest of the Pie? A Dynamic Compositional Approach to Modeling Inequality," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 102(4), pages 1534-1552, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:socsci:v:102:y:2021:i:4:p:1534-1552
    DOI: 10.1111/ssqu.12987
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12987
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/ssqu.12987?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Scott Basinger & Damon Cann & Michael Ensley, 2012. "Voter response to congressional campaigns: new techniques for analyzing aggregate electoral behavior," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 150(3), pages 771-792, March.
    2. Jackson, John E., 2002. "A Seemingly Unrelated Regression Model for Analyzing Multiparty Elections," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 10(1), pages 49-65, January.
    3. Anthony B. Atkinson & Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2011. "Top Incomes in the Long Run of History," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 49(1), pages 3-71, March.
    4. Andrew Q. Philips & Amanda Rutherford & Guy D. Whitten, 2016. "Dynamic Pie: A Strategy for Modeling Trade‐Offs in Compositional Variables over Time," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 60(1), pages 268-283, January.
    5. Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2003. "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(1), pages 1-41.
    6. Nathan J. Kelly, 2005. "Political Choice, Public Policy, and Distributional Outcomes," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 49(4), pages 865-880, October.
    7. Adam Bonica & Nolan McCarty & Keith T. Poole & Howard Rosenthal, 2013. "Why Hasn't Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 27(3), pages 103-124, Summer.
    8. Tomz, Michael & Tucker, Joshua A. & Wittenberg, Jason, 2002. "An Easy and Accurate Regression Model for Multiparty Electoral Data," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 10(1), pages 66-83, January.
    9. Andrew Q. Philips, 2018. "Have Your Cake and Eat It Too? Cointegration and Dynamic Inference from Autoregressive Distributed Lag Models," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 62(1), pages 230-244, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Canh Phuc Nguyen & Binh Quang Nguyen & Duyen Thuy Le Tran, 2023. "Economic complexity and income inequality: New evidence of a nonlinear effect," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 104(4), pages 829-868, July.
    2. Samantha Zuhlke, 2024. "Presidents and nonprofits: Illustrating compositional modeling of the U.S. nonprofit sector," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 105(4), pages 1014-1028, July.
    3. Abbie Eastman & Andrea Junqueira & Ali Kagalwala & Andrew Q. Philips & Guy D. Whitten, 2024. "Volatile pies: Modeling compositional volatility," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 105(4), pages 965-979, July.
    4. Andrea Junqueira & Ali Kagalwala & Christine S. Lipsmeyer, 2023. "What's your problem? How issue ownership and partisan discourse influence personal concerns," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 104(1), pages 25-37, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Xiaobing Shuai, 2015. "Do Economic Development Efforts Benefit All? Business Attraction and Income Inequality," The Review of Regional Studies, Southern Regional Science Association, vol. 45(1), pages 35-56, Spring.
    2. Steven Deller & Craig Maher & Judith Stallmann, 2021. "Do tax and expenditure limitations exacerbate rising income inequality?," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(3), pages 611-643, November.
    3. Till Treeck, 2014. "Did Inequality Cause The U.S. Financial Crisis?," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(3), pages 421-448, July.
    4. Naguib, Costanza, 2019. "Estimating the Heterogeneous Impact of the Free Movement of Persons on Relative Wage Mobility," Economics Working Paper Series 1903, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.
    5. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/vbu6kd1s68o6r34k5bcm3iopv is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Arun Advani, 2022. "Who does and doesn't pay taxes?," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 43(1), pages 5-22, March.
    7. Burkhauser, Richard V. & Larrimore, Jeff & Simon, Kosali I., 2012. "A "Second Opinion" on the Economic Health of the American Middle Class," National Tax Journal, National Tax Association;National Tax Journal, vol. 65(1), pages 7-32, March.
    8. Peter ven de Ven & Anne Harrison & Barbara Fraumeni & Dennis Fixler & David Johnson & Andrew Craig & Kevin Furlong, 2017. "A Consistent Data Series to Evaluate Growth and Inequality in the National Accounts Note: The views expressed in this research, including those related to statistical, methodological, technical, or operational issues, are solely those of the authors ," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 63, pages 437-459, December.
    9. repec:osf:osfxxx:brhd3_v1 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Bjorn Bartling & Alexander Cappelen & Mathias Ekström & Erik Ø. Sørensen & Bertil Tungodden, 2018. "Fairness in Winner-Take-All Markets," Working Papers 2018-031, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    11. Andrienko, Yuri & Apps, Patricia & Rees, Ray, 2014. "Optimal Taxation, Inequality and Top Incomes," IZA Discussion Papers 8275, IZA Network @ LISER.
    12. Alban Verchere, 2022. "Is social polarization bad for the planet? A theoretical inquiry," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 74(2), pages 427-456, April.
    13. Maya Eden & Paul Gaggl, 2018. "On the Welfare Implications of Automation," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 29, pages 15-43, July.
    14. Vladimir Hlasny, 2021. "Parametric representation of the top of income distributions: Options, historical evidence, and model selection," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(4), pages 1217-1256, September.
    15. Johannes König & Christian Schluter & Carsten Schröder, 2025. "Routes to the Top," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 71(2), May.
    16. Schäfer, Andreas & Prettner, Klaus, 2016. "The fall and rise of inequality," VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change 145806, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    17. Advani, Arun & Summers, Andy & Tarrant, Hannah, 2020. "Measuring UK top incomes," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 490, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    18. Rafael Carranza & Marc Morgan & Brian Nolan, 2023. "Top Income Adjustments and Inequality: An Investigation of the EU‐SILC," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 69(3), pages 725-754, September.
    19. Zhang, Haiping, 2022. "Upstream financial flows, intangible investment, and allocative efficiency," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    20. Mijs, Jonathan Jan Benjamin, 2019. "The Paradox of Inequality: Income Inequality and Belief in Meritocracy go Hand in Hand," SocArXiv dcr9b, Center for Open Science.
    21. Raymundo M. Campos-Vazquez & Emmanuel Chavez & Gerardo Esquivel, 2017. "Growth is (really) good for the (really) rich," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(12), pages 2639-2675, December.
    22. Lankisch, Clemens & Prettner, Klaus & Prskawetz, Alexia, 2019. "How can robots affect wage inequality?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 161-169.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:socsci:v:102:y:2021:i:4:p:1534-1552. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0038-4941 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.