AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON OF LIFETIME INEQUALITY: HOW CONTINENTAL EUROPE RESEMBLES NORTH AMERICA

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bowlus, Audra J.; Robin, Jean-Marc
• 署名单位: Western University (University of Western Ontario); Institut d'Etudes Politiques Paris (Sciences Po); University of London; University College London
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1542-4774.2012.01088.x
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 1236-1262
• 关键词: UNITED-STATES; earnings inequality; income mobility; rising inequality; consumption; DYNAMICS; Germany; GROWTH; variance; TRENDS

摘要

We compare earnings inequality and mobility across the United States, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom during the late 1990s. A flexible model of earnings dynamics that isolates positional mobility within a stable earnings distribution is estimated. Earnings trajectories are then simulated, and lifetime annuity value distributions are constructed. Earnings mobility and employment risk are found to be positively correlated with base-year inequality. Taken together they produce more equalization in countries with high cross-section inequality such that the countries in our sample have more similar lifetime inequality levels than cross-section measures suggest.