Time Trends in the Joint Distributions of Income and Age

2001

We propose a method of analyzing time changes of joint income-age densities. Change is decomposed into time invariant components which act on the densities as deformations with time varying strength. The functional form of these components is estimated non parametrically from cross sectional data. The method is applied to analyze British household data on income and age for the years 1968–95. It is learned that for the young and middle aged there is a trend towards increasing inequality, while during the early eighties there seems to occur a reversal in the evolution of the income distribution for the old.