Wage Distributions and the Accounting Period: An Assessment of the Shorrocks Effect
Economic Well-Being and Inequality: Papers from the Fifth ECINEQ Meeting
ISBN: 978-1-78350-567-8, eISBN: 978-1-78350-556-2
Publication date: 30 September 2014
Abstract
When individual or household incomes are collected for administrative or scientific surveys, the accounting period is sometimes a month, sometimes a quarter, and sometimes a year. The accounting period likely affects the shape of the income distribution and the level of measured inequality. The present study systematically explores the sensitivity of inter-temporal and inter-regional inequality comparisons to the length of the accounting period.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgment
All correspondence to: cschroeder@diw.de. I would like to thank the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in particular Joshua Goldstein, and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy for their kind hospitality during research visits from October 2011 to September 2012. Further, I would like to thank the Editors for their professional support, an anonymous Reviewer for her/his most constructive report, and Ralf Himmelreicher of the Research Center of the German Statutory Pension Insurance for guiding me through the data. I also benefited from comments of participants of a research seminar at Hebrew University (2013) and the ECINEQ conference in Bari (2013).
Citation
Schröder, C. (2014), "Wage Distributions and the Accounting Period: An Assessment of the Shorrocks Effect", Economic Well-Being and Inequality: Papers from the Fifth ECINEQ Meeting (Research on Economic Inequality, Vol. 22), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 421-447. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1049-258520140000022014
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
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