Decomposing US Income Inequality à La Shapley: Race Matters, but Gender Too

Arbeitspapier

This paper is an application of a new Shapley income decomposition methodology, in which we isolate two subjective factors in income differences - race and gender - that contribute to income inequality within the population of blacks and whites in the United States over the period 2005-2017. We show that the purely racial contribution to income inequality as defined by the Gini index varies from 1% to 4% depending on the geographical administrative divisions used. Race tends to contribute more to inequality in the Western and Southern part of the country. Whatever the division, the share of income inequality associated with gender exceeds greatly that of race. While gender income inequality falls over time, income inequality associated with race tends to increase.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 12950

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Cooperative Games ; Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement ; Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination ; Labor Discrimination
• Subject: income inequality ; decomposition ; Shapley value ; racial discrimination ; gender discrimination

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Chantreuil, Frédéric ; Fourrey, Kévin ; Lebon, Isabelle ; Rebiere, Therese
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/215346
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET