Race and income distribution: Evidence from the US, Brazil and South Africa

The aim of this paper is to provide some empirical evidence about black-white differentials in the distribution of income and wellbeing in three different countries: Brazil, US and South Africa. In all cases, people of African descent are in a variety of ways socially disadvantaged compared with the relatively more affluent whites. We investigate the extent of these gaps in comparative perspective, and analyze to what degree they can be explained by differences in the observed characteristics of races, such as where they live, the types of household they have, or their performance in the labor market. We undertake this analysis with the Oaxaca-Blinder approach at the means and with the DiNardo-Fortin-Lemieux approach at the entire distribution. Our results show how the factors underlying the racial divide vary across countries and income quantiles.racial inequalities, income distribution, United States, Brazil, South Africa.

Conditional occupational segregation of minorities in the U.S.

In this paper, we use a propensity score-based methodology to analyze the role of demographic and human capital characteristics of minorities in the U.S. in explaining their high occupational segregation with respect to whites. Thus, we measure conditional segregation based on an estimated counterfactual distribution in which minorities are given the relevant characteristics of whites. Our results show that the different levels of attained education by ethnicity and race explain a substantial share of occupational segregation of non-whites in the U.S., while English skills or immigration status are especially relevant for explaining segregation among Hispanics and Asians.conditional occupational segregation, race and ethnicity, United States.

Race, poverty, and deprivation in South Africa

The aim of this paper is to explain why poverty and material deprivation in South Africa are significantly higher among those of African descent than among whites. To do so, we estimate the conditional levels of poverty and deprivation Africans would experience had they the same characteristics as whites. By comparing the actual and counterfactual distributions, we show that the racial gap in poverty and deprivation can be attributed to the cumulative disadvantaged characteristics of Africans, such as their current level of educational attainment, demographic structure, and area of residence, as well as to the inertia of past racial inequalities. Progress made in the educational and labor market outcomes of Africans after Apartheid explains the reduction in the racial poverty differential.poverty, deprivation, race, decomposition, South Africa, households’ characteristics.

Income distribution and income sources in Uruguay

This paper is concerned with changes in the distribution of income sources in Uruguay after the late eighties. An apparent stability in the distribution of total incomes is hiding deep transformations affecting the generation of that income. The distribution across all income earners at the end of the eighties exhibited two well-distinguished poles, each associated with one of the main income sources: pension benefits and wages. This bimodality diminished during the nineties due to the reduction in polarization by income sources. In the same period we find that in the case of labor earnings there was a net transfer of population mass from the middle of the distribution to both extremes, which results in an increasing polarization within this income source. This phenomenon resembles the Anglo-Saxon experience of the shrinking middle class.income sources, inequality, labor market, pension benefits, polarization

The measurement of gender wage discrimination: The distributional approach revisited

This paper presents the advantages of taking into account the distribution of the individual wage gap when analyzing female wage discrimination. The limitations of previous approaches such as the classic Oaxaca-Blinder and the recent distributive proposals using quantile regressions or counterfactual functions are thoroughly discussed. The new methodology presented here relies on Jenkins' (1994) work and proposes the use of poverty and deprivation literature techniques that are directly applicable to the measurement of discrimination. In an empirical application, we quantify the relevance of the glass ceiling and sticky floor phenomena in the Spanish labor market.children distributive analysis, economics of gender, wage discrimination, glass ceiling, sticky floor.

Poverty and Women’s Labor Market Activity: the Role of Gender Wage Discrimination in the EU

The functioning of the labor market often has been stressed as a clear determinant in explaining poverty trends in developed countries. In this paper, we analyze the role of gender wage discrimination on household poverty rates in several EU countries, linking two related phenomena that rarely are analyzed together. In order to quantify the impact of discrimination on poverty, we propose the construction of a counterfactual distribution of wages where discrimination against women has been removed. Using this new wage distribution, we compute total household income and compare poverty rates in the absence of discrimination to those actually observed. Our results show that, in general, it is true that discrimination against women plays a determinant role in the current levels of poverty, even if we discover that results for each country present a different pattern and intensity. Further, we find that the effect of discrimination on poverty risk dramatically increases for individuals in households who largely depend on working female earnings, especially in the case of single mothers.poverty, inequality, income distribution, gender, wage discrimination, labor participation.

Measuring poverty accounting for time

In this paper we make a methodological proposal to measure poverty accounting for time by proposing a new index that aims at reconciling the way poverty is measured in a static and a dynamic framework. Our index is able to consider the duration of the poverty spell and the social preference for equality in well-being given that, in contrast with others that have been previously proposed, it is sensitive to the level of inequality between individual complete poverty experiences over time. Moreover, other indices in the literature can be interpreted as special cases of our more general measure.intertemporal poverty, duration, equality, poverty measurement