This paper extends the famous Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973) discrimination in several directions. First, the wage difference breakdown is not limited to two groups. Second, a decomposition technique is proposed that allows analysis of the determinants of the overall wage dispersion. The...

This paper begins by proposing two cardinal measures of inequality in life chances as well as an ordinal representation of such inequality based on the use of so-called social immobility curves. Using as its database a matrix in which the lines correspond to the social category of parents (e.g.,...

This paper begins with an examination of various ways of measuring unemployment and, borrowing ideas from the poverty measurement literature, proposes four new general unemployment indices. The first of these is parallel to the Sen poverty index; the second, to the Sen index’s generalization...