Journal Article

Are changes in the dispersion of hours worked a cause of increased earnings inequality?

By Daniele Checchi, Cecilia Garcia-Penalosa and Lara Vivian

Publication details

Publication date
Published in
IZA Journal of European Labor Studies
Volume
5
Publisher
Springer
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40174-016-0065-2
ISSN
21939012

Summary

Earnings are the product of wages and hours of work; hence, the dispersion of hours can magnify or dampen a given distribution of wages. This paper examines how earnings inequality is affected by the dispersion of working hours using data for the USA, the UK, Germany, and France over the period 1989–2012. We find that hours dispersion can account for over a third of earnings inequality in some countries and that its contribution has been growing over time. We interpret the expansion in hours inequality in European countries as being the result of weaker union power that led to less successful bargaining concerning working hours.

Notes

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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