IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/19959.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Two sides to every story: measuring the polarisation of work

Author

Listed:
  • Gregg, Paul
  • Wadsworth, Jonathan

Abstract

Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. This paper introduces a simple set of indices that can be used to measure the extent of divergence between individual and household-based jobless measures. The indices, built around a comparison of the actual household jobless rate with that which would occur if work were randomly distributed over the working age population, conform to basic consistency axioms and can be decomposed to try to identify the likely source of any disparity between nonemployment rates calculated at the 2 levels of aggregation. Applying these measures to data for Britain, we show that there has been a growing disparity ¿ polarisation - between the individual and household based jobless measures that are largely unrelated to changes in household structure or the principal characteristics associated with individual joblessness.

Suggested Citation

  • Gregg, Paul & Wadsworth, Jonathan, 2004. "Two sides to every story: measuring the polarisation of work," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 19959, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
  • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:19959
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/19959/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joan Esteban & Carlos Gradín & Debraj Ray, 2007. "An Extension of a Measure of Polarization, with an application to the income distribution of five OECD countries," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 5(1), pages 1-19, April.
    2. Paul Gregg, 1996. "It Takes Two: Employment Polarisation in the OECD," CEP Discussion Papers dp0304, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    3. Haddad, Lawrence & Kanbur, Ravi, 1990. "How Serious Is the Neglect of Intra-Household Inequality?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 100(402), pages 866-881, September.
    4. Dickens & David T. Ellwood, 2004. "Whither Poverty in Great Britain and the United States? The Determinants of Changing Poverty and Whether Work Will Work," NBER Chapters, in: Seeking a Premier Economy: The Economic Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980–2000, pages 313-370, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Hills,John (ed.), 1996. "New Inequalities," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521556989.
    6. Hills,John (ed.), 1996. "New Inequalities," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521553261.
    7. Atkinson, Anthony B., 1970. "On the measurement of inequality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 2(3), pages 244-263, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Christian Dustmann & Francesca Fabbri, 2005. "Gender and Ethnicity--Married Immigrants in Britain," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 21(3), pages 462-484, Autumn.
    2. Peter Dawkins & Paul Gregg & Rosanna Scutella, 2005. "Employment Polarisation in Australia," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 81(255), pages 336-350, December.
    3. Neil Lee & Paul Sissons, 2016. "Inclusive growth? The relationship between economic growth and poverty in British cities," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 48(11), pages 2317-2339, November.
    4. Elena Stancanelli, 2006. "Les couples sur le marché de l'emploi," PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) hal-03389366, HAL.
    5. repec:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/9719 is not listed on IDEAS
    6. Nolen, Patrick, 2006. "Unemployment and Family-Values: A Household Distribution Sensitive Measure of Unemployment and Some Applications," Working Papers 05-03rr, Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics.
    7. MONCEL Nathalie, 2004. "Differentiations in structures of employees' resources: a comparison of eight European countries," IRISS Working Paper Series 2004-02, IRISS at CEPS/INSTEAD.
    8. repec:hal:spmain:info:hdl:2441/9719 is not listed on IDEAS

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Shahateet, Mohammed & Al-Tayyeb, Saud, 2007. "Regional consumption inequalities in Jordan: Empirical study," MPRA Paper 57400, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Paul Gregg & Rosanna Scutella & Jonathan Wadsworth, 2010. "Reconciling workless measures at the individual and household level. Theory and evidence from the United States, Britain, Germany, Spain and Australia," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 23(1), pages 139-167, January.
    3. Mejía-Guerra, José Antonio & Vos, Rob, 1997. "Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Inventory: 1980-95," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 6197, Inter-American Development Bank.
    4. Alfons J. Weichenrieder & Tasneem Zafar & Alfons Weichenrieder, 2011. "Evaluating Real World Income Distributions behind the Veil of Ignorance - How Risk Averse do you have to be to Prefer Europe over the US?," CESifo Working Paper Series 3632, CESifo.
    5. Paul Gregg & Jonathan Wadsworth, 2008. "Two sides to every story: measuring polarization and inequality in the distribution of work," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 171(4), pages 857-875, October.
    6. Labeaga, José M. & Molina, José Alberto & Navarro Paniagua, Maria, 2007. "Income Satisfaction and Deprivation in Spain," IZA Discussion Papers 2702, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    7. Satya R. Chakravarty & Amita Majumder & Sonali Roy, 2007. "A Treatment Of Absolute Indices Of Polarization," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 58(2), pages 273-293, June.
    8. Nicola Cantore & Emilio Padilla, 2009. "Emissions distribution in post–Kyoto international negotiations: a policy perspective," Working Papers wpdea0907, Department of Applied Economics at Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona.
    9. Brown, Caitlin & Calvi, Rossella & Penglase, Jacob, 2021. "Sharing the pie: An analysis of undernutrition and individual consumption in Bangladesh," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 200(C).
    10. Mauro Mussini, 2017. "Decomposing Changes in Inequality and Welfare Between EU Regions: The Roles of Population Change, Re-Ranking and Income Growth," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 130(2), pages 455-478, January.
    11. Nuno Crespo & Sandrina B. Moreira & Nadia Simoes, 2015. "Integrated Approach for the Measurement of Inequality, Poverty, and Richness," Panoeconomicus, Savez ekonomista Vojvodine, Novi Sad, Serbia, vol. 62(5), pages 531-555.
    12. Bourguignon, François, 1993. "Individus, familles et bien-être social," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 69(4), pages 243-258, décembre.
    13. Alexander Sohn, 2015. "Beyond Conventional Wage Discrimination Analysis: Assessing Comprehensive Wage Distributions of Males and Females Using Structured Additive Distributional Regression," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 802, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    14. José Antonio Mejía-Guerra & Rob Vos, 1997. "Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Inventory: 1980-95," IDB Publications (Working Papers) 10878, Inter-American Development Bank.
    15. James E. Foster & Joel Greer & Erik Thorbecke, 2010. "The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) Poverty Measures: Twenty-Five Years Later," Working Papers 2010-14, The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.
    16. Cameron, Lisa A., 2000. "Poverty and inequality in Java: examining the impact of the changing age, educational and industrial structure," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(1), pages 149-180, June.
    17. Haider Ali Khan, 2004. "Development as Freedom," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-257, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
    18. Harttgen, Kenneth & Klasen, Stephan, 2012. "A Household-Based Human Development Index," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 40(5), pages 878-899.
    19. Marzena Rostek, 2000. "How Do Income Distributions Change in Europe?," LIS Working papers 240, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    20. Yoonseok Lee & Donggyun Shin, 2013. "Measuring Social Unrest Based on Income Distribution," Center for Policy Research Working Papers 160, Center for Policy Research, Maxwell School, Syracuse University.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Workless households; Distribution of work; Polarisation; Joblessness;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J0 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General
    • C1 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General
    • J6 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:19959. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.