IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Log in (now much improved!) to save this article

A Life Cycle Perspective on Changes in Earnings Inequality among Married Men and Women

Author Info

  • John Pencavel

Abstract

The connection between changes in earnings inequality of individuals and changes in family earnings involves several links: the movements in the employment of different family members, the association between changes in husbands' and in wives' earnings, and patterns of assortative mating. A decomposition of the logarithm of the coefficient of variation in family earnings identifies these links. The data on the dispersion of family earnings are organized not simply over time, but also by age. The growth in wives' relative employment and earnings has partly offset the effects on family earnings inequality of the increase in husbands' earnings inequality. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/rest.88.2.232
File Function: link to full text
Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.

Article provided by MIT Press in its journal The Review of Economics and Statistics.

Volume (Year): 88 (2006)
Issue (Month): 2 (May)
Pages: 232-242

as
in new window

Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:88:y:2006:i:2:p:232-242
Contact details of provider: Web page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/

Order Information: Web: http://mitpress.mit.edu/journal-home.tcl?issn=00346535

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
  • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply
  • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

as in new window
  1. Deaton, Angus & Paxson, Christina, 1994. "Intertemporal Choice and Inequality," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(3), pages 437-67, June.
  2. Lehrer, Evelyn & Nerlove, Marc, 1981. "The Impact of Female Work on Family Income Distribution in the United States: Black-White Differentials," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 27(4), pages 423-31, December.
  3. Dean R. Hyslop, 2001. "Rising U.S. Earnings Inequality and Family Labor Supply: The Covariance Structure of Intrafamily Earnings," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(4), pages 755-777, September.
  4. Chinhui Juhn & Kevin M. Murphy, 1996. "Wage Inequality and Family Labor Supply," NBER Working Papers 5459, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  5. Layard, Richard & Zabalza, Antoni, 1979. "Family Income Distribution: Explanation and Policy Evaluation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 87(5), pages S133-61, October.
  6. Maria Cancian & Deborah Reed, 1998. "Assessing The Effects Of Wives' Earnings On Family Income Inequality," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 80(1), pages 73-79, February.
  7. Lehrer, Evelyn & Nerlove, Marc, 1984. "A Life-Cycle Analysis of Family Income Distribution," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 22(3), pages 360-74, July.
  8. Smith, James P, 1979. "The Distribution of Family Earnings," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 87(5), pages 163-92, October.
  9. Orazio Attanasio & Gabriella Berloffa & Richard Blundell & Ian Preston, 2002. "From Earnings Inequality to Consumption Inequality," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(478), pages C52-C59, March.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

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

as in new window


Cited by:

  1. Burkhauser, Richard V. & Feng, Shuaizhang & Jenkins, Stephen P., 2007. "Using the P90/P10 index to measure US inquality trends with current population survey data: a view from inside the Census Bureau vaults," ISER Working Paper Series 2007-14, Institute for Social and Economic Research.
  2. Huang, Fung-Mey & Luh, Yir-Hueih & Huang, Fung-Yea, 2012. "Unemployment information and wives’ labor supply responses to husbands’ job loss in Taiwan," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 1176-1194.
  3. Ostrovsky, Yuri, 2012. "The correlation of spouses' permanent and transitory earnings and family earnings inequality in Canada," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(5), pages 756-768.
  4. El Lahga, AbdelRahmen & Moreau, Nicolas, 2007. "The Effects of Marriage on Couples’ Allocation of Time Between Market and Non-Market Hours," IZA Discussion Papers 2619, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
  5. Kimhi, Ayal, 2011. "Can Female Non-Farm Labor Income Reduce Income Inequality? Evidence from Rural Southern Ethiopia," 2011 International Congress, August 30-September 2, 2011, Zurich, Switzerland 114756, European Association of Agricultural Economists.
  6. Richard V. Burkhauser & Shuaizhang Feng & Stephen P. Jenkins, 2009. "Using The P90-P10 Index To Measure U.S. Inequality Trends With Current Population Survey Data: A View From Inside The Census Bureau Vaults," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 55(1), pages 166-185, 03.
  7. Olivier Donni & Eleonora Matteazzi, 2012. "On the Importance of Household Production in Collective Models: Evidence from U.S. Data," Annals of Economics and Statistics, GENES, issue 105-106, pages 99-125.
  8. El Lahga, AbdelRahmen & Moreau, Nicolas, 2007. "Would you Marry me? The Effects of Marriage on German Couples? Allocation of Time," ZEW Discussion Papers 07-024, ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research.
  9. Pencavel, John, 2006. "Earnings Inequality and Market Work in Husband-Wife Families," IZA Discussion Papers 2235, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
  10. Kimhi, Ayal, 2008. "Male Income, Female Income, and Household Income Inequality in Israel: A Decomposition Analysis," Discussion Papers 46293, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Department of Agricultural Economics and Management.
  11. Richard Breen & Signe Andersen, 2012. "Educational Assortative Mating and Income Inequality in Denmark," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 49(3), pages 867-887, August.

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:88:y:2006:i:2:p:232-242. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Kristin Waites)

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 references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

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

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.