Local Segregation and Well-being

This paper proposes an index that quantifies the well-being (ill-being) of a target group as associated with its occupational segregation: that is, it assesses the gains/losses of that group which are derived from its underrepresentation in some occupations and overrepresentation in others. This index has several good properties. In particular, it is equal to zero when either the group has no segregation or all occupations have the same wage, and increases when individuals of the group move into occupations that have higher wages than those left behind. Moreover, our well-being measure permits to rank different demographic groups using distributive value judgments that are in the line of those conducted in the literature on economic inequality.