Modelling Earnings Dynamics and Inequality: Foreign Workers and Inequality Trends in Luxembourg, 1988–2009

Abstract

Summary. The paper exploits large-scale administrative data to analyse trends in male earnings inequality in Luxembourg during 20 years of rapid economic growth, industrial redevelopment and massive inflow of foreign workers. A detailed error components model is estimated to identify persistent and transitory components of (the trends of) log-earnings variance and to disentangle the contributions to it of native, immigrant and cross-border workers. The model is flexible and allows for a high degree of individual, age, time and cohort heterogeneity. We observe a surprising stability in overall earnings inequality as a result of more complex underlying changes, with marked increases in persistent inequality (except among natives), a growing contribution of foreigners and a decrease in earnings instability (primarily for natives).

Wealth Inequality: A Survey

“…() show how maximum likelihood estimation of the distribution parameters can be adjusted to account for top‐coding and then be used to recover uncensored observations by simulation. See Sologon and Van Kerm () for an application with a Pareto upper tail model.…”

Inequalities in access to cross-border resources? An analysis based on spatio-temporal behaviours in the cross-border area of Greater Geneva

“…Once again, the border studies literature has first turned for these questions to the labour market and cross-border workers (Gottholmseder and Theurl, 2007;Pierrard, 2008), emphasising the obstacles to and constraints of this way of life -although this population is not as homogeneous as often described in the literature. Cross-border workers generally occupy a dominant position in the cross-border agglomeration (Saez-Rodriguez, 2011), but are not exempted from all inequalities (Sologon and van Kerm, 2018). In their work, Bolzman and Vial (2007) report on various behaviours for these crossborder workers that depend on their acculturation level in the country of work and their representations about the foundations of national identity.…”