Decomposing Changes in the Wage Distribution in Taiwan
2015/11/24
研討會日期 : 2015-11-24
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Hsiu-Fen Hsu
主持人 : Professor Tzu-Ting Yang
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Hsu received her Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University, U.S.A. and Master in International Public Policy from Osaka University, Japan. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at National Taipei University. Her research fields are Labor Economics, and Applied Econometrics. Her research focuses on wage and income inequality, intergenerational/ multigenerational income mobility, earnings instability, and youth unemployment.
演講摘要 : This paper documents several changes that occurred in wage distribution in Taiwan between 1978 and 2012. For men, wage inequality narrowed initially, but then started widening. The declining wage inequality occurred evenly across the entire male wage distribution before the 1990s, when the economy was growing rapidly. Since the early 1990s, wage inequality among male workers has been rising, and the growth in inequality has been mainly due to expansion in upper-tail inequality. Around the same time, an increase in the college wage premium for male workers is also observed. Using a hybrid DFL reweighting approach, this study decomposes the changes in wage inequality into three main components: changes in the skill composition of the workforce, returns to skill, and residuals. The results show that for male workers, increases in returns to skill that arise from shifts in demand for skill play an important role in explaining the rising upper-tail wage inequality in the 1990s. By contrast, for female workers, changes in the skill composition of the workforce play an important role in explaining rising upper-tail inequality before the 1990s.
