The editor in charge of this paper was Fabio Canova.
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AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON OF LIFETIME INEQUALITY: HOW CONTINENTAL EUROPE RESEMBLES NORTH AMERICA
Article first published online: 14 AUG 2012
DOI: 10.1111/j.1542-4774.2012.01088.x
© 2012 by the European Economic Association
Issue
Journal of the European Economic Association
Volume 10, Issue 6, pages 1236–1262, December 2012
Additional Information
How to Cite
Bowlus, A. J. and Robin, J.-M. (2012), AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON OF LIFETIME INEQUALITY: HOW CONTINENTAL EUROPE RESEMBLES NORTH AMERICA. Journal of the European Economic Association, 10: 1236–1262. doi: 10.1111/j.1542-4774.2012.01088.x
Acknowledgments: We thank the editor, three anonymous referees, Joseph Altonji, Richard Blundell, Martin Browning, Peter Gottschalk, Steven Haider, Robert Moffitt, Giuseppe Moscarini, Bernard Salanié, and Gary Solon for helpful comments and discussion. We also thank participants in seminars at University of Oxford, New York University, Columbia University, Yale University, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and conference sessions at the First Annual CLSRN conference, the second annual UM/MSU/UWO Labor Economics Day, and the Canadian Econometrics Study Group. Audra J. Bowlus gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and data assistance at the University of Western Ontario’s Research Data Centre. Jean-Marc Robin gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council for the ESRC Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, “Cemmap” (grant reference RES-589-28-0001), and from the Direction de l’Animation de la Recherche, des Etudes et des Statistiques (DARES) of the French Ministére de l’Emploi et de la Solidarité (convention no. 4028).
Publication History
- Issue published online: 6 NOV 2012
- Article first published online: 14 AUG 2012
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Keywords:
- J60;
- J30;
- E24;
- O57
Abstract
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.