IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/jnlbes/v33y2015i3p323-337.html

Decomposing the Composition Effect: The Role of Covariates in Determining Between-Group Differences in Economic Outcomes

Author

Listed:
  • Christoph Rothe

Abstract

In this article, we study the structure of the composition effect, which is the part of the observed between-group difference in the distribution of some economic outcome that can be explained by differences in the distribution of covariates. Using results from copula theory, we derive a new representation that contains three types of components: (i) the "direct contribution" of each covariate due to between-group differences in the respective marginal distributions, (ii) several "two-way" and "higher-order interaction effects" due to the interplay between two or more marginal distributions, and (iii) a "dependence effect" accounting for between-group differences in dependence patterns among the covariates. We show how these components can be estimated in practice, and use our method to study the evolution of the wage distribution in the United States between 1985 and 2005. We obtain some new and interesting empirical findings. For example, our estimates suggest that the dependence effect alone can explain about one-fifth of the increase in wage inequality over that period (as measured by the difference between the 90% and the 10% quantile).

Suggested Citation

  • Christoph Rothe, 2015. "Decomposing the Composition Effect: The Role of Covariates in Determining Between-Group Differences in Economic Outcomes," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(3), pages 323-337, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:jnlbes:v:33:y:2015:i:3:p:323-337
    DOI: 10.1080/07350015.2014.948959
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/07350015.2014.948959
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/07350015.2014.948959?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
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Trivedi, Pravin K. & Zimmer, David M., 2007. "Copula Modeling: An Introduction for Practitioners," Foundations and Trends(R) in Econometrics, now publishers, vol. 1(1), pages 1-111, April.
    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. David Gallusser & Matthias Krapf, 2022. "Joint Income-Wealth Inequality: Evidence from Lucerne Tax Data," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 163(1), pages 251-295, August.
    2. Trinh Thi, Huong & Simioni, Michel & Thomas-Agnan, Christine, 2018. "Assessing the nonlinearity of the calorie-income relationship: An estimation strategy – With new insights on nutritional transition in Vietnam," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 192-204.
    3. Luis Ayala & Javier Martín‐Román & Juan Vicente, 2024. "What contributes to rising inequality in large cities?," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 64(5), pages 1760-1810, November.
    4. Hafifa Siddiq & Najmeh Maharlouei & Babak Najand & Arash Rahmani & Hossein Zare, 2023. "Immigration Status, Educational Level, and Perceived Discrimination in Europe," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(3), pages 1-14, January.
    5. Awaworyi Churchill, Sefa & Munyanyi, Musharavati Ephraim & Prakash, Kushneel & Smyth, Russell, 2020. "Locus of control and the gender gap in mental health," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 178(C), pages 740-758.
    6. Georg Keilbar & Sonja Greven, 2026. "Counterfactual Density Effects and the German East--West Income Gap," Papers 2603.28470, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2026.
    7. Jeremiah Richey & Alicia Rosburg, 2020. "Decomposing joint distributions via reweighting functions: an application to intergenerational economic mobility," Econometric Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(6), pages 541-558, July.
    8. Trinh Thi, Huong & Simioni, Michel & Thomas-Agnan, Christine, 2018. "Decomposition of changes in the consumption of macronutrients in Vietnam between 2004 and 2014," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 259-275.
    9. Qin, Yu & Zhu, Hongjia & Zhu, Rong, 2016. "Changes in the distribution of land prices in urban China during 2007–2012," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 77-90.
    10. David Gallusser & Matthias Krapf, 2019. "Joint Income-Wealth Inequality: An Application Using Administrative Tax Data," CESifo Working Paper Series 7876, CESifo.
    11. Lidia Panico & Maxime Tô, 2023. "A distributional decomposition of birthweight differences by maternal education: A comparison of France and the UK," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 21(3), pages 591-617, September.
    12. Rothe, Christoph & Wied, Dominik, 2020. "Estimating derivatives of function-valued parameters in a class of moment condition models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 217(1), pages 1-19.

    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. David Zimmer, 2025. "A copula-based method for accommodating feedback in random effects panel models," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 69(4), pages 2093-2108, October.
    2. Jörg Schwiebert, 2016. "Multinomial choice models based on Archimedean copulas," AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis, Springer;German Statistical Society, vol. 100(3), pages 333-354, July.
    3. Salmon, Claire & Tanguy, Jeremy, 2016. "Rural Electrification and Household Labor Supply: Evidence from Nigeria," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 48-68.
    4. Marc Gronwald & Janina Ketterer & Stefan Trück, 2011. "The Dependence Structure between Carbon Emission Allowances and Financial Markets - A Copula Analysis," CESifo Working Paper Series 3418, CESifo.
    5. Genius, Margarita & Stefanou, Spiro E. & Tzouvelekas, Vangelis, 2012. "Measuring productivity growth under factor non-substitution: An application to US steam-electric power generation utilities," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 220(3), pages 844-852.
    6. Lee, Richard J. & Sener, Ipek N. & Mokhtarian, Patricia L. & Handy, Susan L., 2017. "Relationships between the online and in-store shopping frequency of Davis, California residents," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 100(C), pages 40-52.
    7. Chandra Bhat & Ipek Sener, 2009. "A copula-based closed-form binary logit choice model for accommodating spatial correlation across observational units," Journal of Geographical Systems, Springer, vol. 11(3), pages 243-272, September.
    8. Azam, Kazim & Pitt, Michael, 2014. "Bayesian Inference for a Semi-Parametric Copula-based Markov Chain," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1051, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    9. repec:cfe:wpcefa:2013_12 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Jeffrey Racine, 2015. "Mixed data kernel copulas," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 48(1), pages 37-59, February.
    11. Shasha Liu & Toshiyuki Yamamoto & Enjian Yao, 2023. "Joint modeling of mode choice and travel distance with intra-household interactions," Transportation, Springer, vol. 50(5), pages 1527-1552, October.
    12. J. Christopher Westland, 2015. "Economics of eBay’s buyer protection plan," Financial Innovation, Springer;Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, vol. 1(1), pages 1-20, December.
    13. Michael Alley & Max Biggs & Rim Hariss & Charles Herrmann & Michael Lingzhi Li & Georgia Perakis, 2023. "Pricing for Heterogeneous Products: Analytics for Ticket Reselling," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 25(2), pages 409-426, March.
    14. Bokusheva, Raushan, 2010. "Measuring the dependence structure between yield and weather variables," MPRA Paper 22786, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Isabel Maria Pereira Viegas Vieira, 2008. "Contagion effects of the US Subprime Crisis on Developed Countries," CEFAGE-UE Working Papers 2008_08, University of Evora, CEFAGE-UE (Portugal).
    16. Ostap Okhrin & Anastasija Tetereva, 2017. "The Realized Hierarchical Archimedean Copula in Risk Modelling," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 5(2), pages 1-31, June.
    17. Michele Bonollo & Irene Crimaldi & Andrea Flori & Laura Gianfagna & Fabio Pammolli, 2016. "Assessing financial distress dependencies in OTC markets: a new approach using trade repositories data," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 30(4), pages 397-426, November.
    18. Amar, Amine & Antonio, Ronald Jeremy S. & Okou, Cyrille Guei & Pede, Valerien O., 2025. "Stochastic modelling of food insecurity risk in Africa: Use of Vine Copulas and cointegration approaches," 2025 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2025, Denver, CO 360696, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    19. Terence C. Cheng & Pravin K. Trivedi, 2015. "Attrition Bias in Panel Data: A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing? A Case Study Based on the Mabel Survey," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 24(9), pages 1101-1117, September.
    20. Butts, David J. & Thompson, Noelle E. & Christensen, Sonja A. & Williams, David M. & Murillo, Michael S., 2022. "Data-driven agent-based model building for animal movement through Exploratory Data Analysis," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 470(C).
    21. Bhat, Chandra R. & Sener, Ipek N. & Eluru, Naveen, 2010. "A flexible spatially dependent discrete choice model: Formulation and application to teenagers' weekday recreational activity participation," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 44(8-9), pages 903-921, September.

    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:taf:jnlbes:v:33:y:2015:i:3:p:323-337. 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/UBES20 .

    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.