The labour market and the distribution of income: an empirical analysis for Italy

This paper provides an empirical examination of the distribution of labour earnings in Italy. Using four waves of data from the Participation Labour Unemployment Survey, a database of information on the Italian labour market supply, we find the shape of the observed distributions to be positively skewed with a “fat” and long tail on the right. We also address the question of earnings dispersion by applying a “nested” decomposition procedure of the Theil inequality measure, which combines into a unified framework the standard decompositions by population subgroups and income sources. The empirical evidence obtained points to the key role played by the self-employees in shaping labour income inequality, especially at the upper extreme of the earnings distribution, and the emergence of non-standard forms of employment as an important feature of the contemporary workplace.