Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics
Working Papers,
Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics
No 9-2019: On Using Pareto Distributions for Measuring Top-Income Gender Disparities
Hansen Niels-Jakob Harbo, Harmenberg Karl (), Öberg Erik and Sievertsen Hans-Henrik
Additional contact information
Hansen Niels-Jakob Harbo: International Monetary Fund
Harmenberg Karl: Department of Economics, Copenhagen Business School, Postal: Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics, Porcelaenshaven 16 A. 1. floor, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Öberg Erik: Uppsala University
Sievertsen Hans-Henrik: University of Bristol
Abstract: Atkinson et al. (2018) propose a measure of the glass ceiling exploiting that top incomes are approximately Pareto distributed. We clarify how this glass-ceiling coefficient describes the increasing scarcity of women further up in the income distribution and show how it relates to the top-income gender gap. If interpreting top income gender differences as caused by a female-specific income tax, the gender gap and glass ceiling coefficient measure its level and progressivity, respectively. Using Danish data on earnings, we show that the top gender gap and the glass-ceiling coefficient evolves across time, the life cycle, and educational groups.
Keywords: decomposition; gender gap; glass ceiling; summary statistics
16 pages, September 27, 2019
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