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Title: Ethics and Income Inequality: Uncovering unethical earnings in the US based on group identity
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2015
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Abstract: The literature in social sciences on identity, stratification, and intersectionality has long shown the importance of group identity in explaining the persistence of income inequality over time. However, methodological individualism and marginalism in economics mean that income inequality is still assessed from the perspective of the individual with individual income as dependent variable, individual characteristics as control variables, and a time trend to asses the path-dependency of inequality. By taking a group perspective to individuals, the contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, the paper extends the fair wage-effort hypothesis to the macroeconomic and societal levels in order to define ethical earnings according to the nature of their long-run trend vis-a-vis the long-run trend of national income. Second, the paper presents a long-run methodology to uncover ethical and unethical earnings which reveals the cumulative effects of income inequality by group over time. This methodology is then applied to the US income stratification by race, ethnicity and gender identities at the occupation level between 1970 and 2011. Results show that rent-seeking behaviour is a group phenomenon which extends to most of the US labor force.
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Authors: Charle, Aurlie; Vuji, Sunica
Publisher: University of Bath
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other, Race and Ethnicity
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