Analysing Inequalities in Germany (eBook)

Alexander Silbersdorff is a research associate at the Department of Statistics, University of Göttingen, Germany, where he predominantly works on the development and application of regression techniques to economic contexts. Previously, he served at the Department of Economic History at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, where he investigated the development of historical income structures.

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Inequality and Earnings Distributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72.1 A Brief Glance at the History of Income Inequality Analysis . . . . . . 72.2 Preliminaries on the Income Distribution and Inequality Measures . 92.2.1 Income variables, units and data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102.2.2 Distributional measures and informational complexity . . . . . 132.3 The Development of German Earnings Distributions, 1988-2013 . . . 17References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Estimating and Assessing Distributional Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253.1 On Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253.1.1 The linear model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253.1.2 Parameter estimation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273.2 Structured Additive Distributional Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323.2.1 Structured additive regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333.2.2 Parametric distributions and SADR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343.2.3 Differentiating with respect to covariates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383.3 Other Methods for Estimating Conditional Distributions . . . . . . . . . . 403.3.1 A contrast with quantile and expectile regression . . . . . . . . . . 413.3.2 A contrast with distribution regression and conditionaltransformation models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433.4 A Note on Panel Data and Individual-Specific Effects . . . . . . . . . . . . 453.5 A Note on State Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524 The Distributional Perspective and Labour Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594.1 The Market Equilibrium Price and Mean Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . 594.2 Market Places and Market Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 614.2.1 On the ideal-typical modern labour market model . . . . . . . . . 614.2.2 Five problems of the one-price depiction of a market place . 624.2.3 Conceptualising a labour market space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 644.3 Towards a distributional perspective of labour markets . . . . . . . . . . . . 72References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 745 Applications of SADR in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 775.1 First Steps in Analysing Conditional Earnings Distributions . . . . . . . 775.2 Taking a Bayesian Perspective and Proposing SADR . . . . . . . . . . . . . 825.3 Gender, Earnings and SADR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 875.4 Health Effect Assessment based on SADR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 925.5 Unemployment, Inequality and SADR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 986 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1036.1 The Distributional Perspective and SADR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1036.2 Possible Directions for Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1056.3 Some last words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109