Speaker: Alexandre Jacquemain (UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles)
Title: The contribution of education to long-run trends in labor earnings inequality
Abstract: We study the contribution of education to long-run trends in labor earnings inequality using LIS data. Education shapes inequality through distinct channels — attainment levels, assortative mating, and returns to education — each of which must be separately identified. Moreover, education affects single men, single women, and couples in different ways, and the composition of these household types has itself evolved over time, making it necessary to jointly account for within-type effects and compositional shifts. Taking a reduced-form approach, we model the full joint distribution of partners' earnings within couples, alongside the earnings distributions of singles, using high-dimensional bivariate distribution regression with LASSO penalization. The model accommodates labor non-participation as a mass point at zero and allows within-couple earnings dependence to vary across the distribution and with household characteristics. Counterfactual distributions are constructed for each household type and for the overall equivalized earnings distribution, and decomposed via Shapley weights to assess the relative importance of the different education channels against broader socio-demographic change. We illustrate the approach with US data.
Speaker: Domenico Moramarco (University of Bari Aldo Moro)
Title: Bridging social norms: a framework for assessing unjust inequality
Abstract: This paper develops a norm-based framework for measuring unjust inequality that combines three distributive principles: equality of opportunity, sufficientarianism, and limitarianism. We characterize fair income distributions satisfying feasibility, freedom from poverty, limits to excessive income, and equality of opportunity. The analysis shows that the compatibility of these principles crucially depends on how inequality among individuals sharing the same circumstances is normatively restricted. We study several alternative specifications of within-type reward and derive the conditions under which the corresponding norm distributions exist and are unique. In particular, we show that exogenous poverty and richness thresholds may generate incompatibilities, motivating endogenous richness lines linked to the resources required to eliminate poverty.
Unjust inequality is then measured as the divergence between the observed income distribution and a normatively grounded counterfactual distribution. We illustrate the empirical relevance of the approach using harmonised LIS microdata for European countries, focusing on equivalised disposable household income and circumstance variables such as parental education, gender, and birthplace.
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