The issue of measuring the relative importance of income factors in the distribution of household income is at the heart of studies of changes in income inequality. Usual decompositions methods mostly based on Shorrocks (1982) framework allow for a broad evaluation of the contribution of income...

We use recently developed methods to perform decompositions of the Lorenz curve in the United States by race, region, and marital status. The decomposed Lorenz ordinates are used to construct interdistributional Lorenz curves (ILCs), which allow us to identify an economic advantage by one...

The Blinder Oaxaca decomposition method for defining wage differentials (generally referred to as discrimination) from the wage equations of two groups has had a wide degree of application. However, the decomposition measures can very dramatically depending on the definition of the...