A BEJEAP Advances article.

Abstract

The existence of glass ceilings and sticky floors suggests that disadvantaged workers will be under-represented in some parts of the income distribution, and over-represented in others. We present a representation index that measures the prevalence of population subgroups in different regions of the income (or any other) distribution. Our representation index is easily generalized to condition on characteristics (such as age, education, etc). Further, it generalizes naturally to an index of the severity (or cost) of under-representation to group members, which is based on dollar-weighted representation. Both representation and severity indices are easily calculated via existing regression techniques. We illustrate the approach using Canadian Census data on the earnings of ethnic minorities.

Submitted: January 7, 2008 · Accepted: August 25, 2008 · Published: October 27, 2008

Recommended Citation

Pendakur, Krishna; Pendakur, Ravi; and Woodcock, Simon D. (2008) "A Representation Index: Measuring the Representation of Minorities in the Income Distribution," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy: Vol. 8 : Iss. 1 (Advances), Article 44.
DOI: 10.2202/1935-1682.1942
Available at: http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/vol8/iss1/art44

Related Files

severity.ado (3 kB)
stata code to estimate severity
representation.ado (2 kB)
stata code to estimate representation