In Chile, indigenous students obtain lower test scores, on average, than nonindigenous students. Between two cohorts of eighth-graders in the late 1990s, the test score gap declined by 0.1 to 0.2 standard deviations. An Oaxaca decomposition and related descriptive evidence suggest that the most plausible explanation is related to Chile’s large-scale school reforms that were targeted at low-achi...

Background Visual acuity, like many other health-related problems, does not have an equal distribution in terms of socio-economic factors. We conducted this study to estimate and decompose economic inequality in presenting visual acuity using two methods and to compare their results in a population aged 40-64 years in Shahroud, Iran.   Methods: The data of 5188 participants in the first phase o...

The distinct feature of Bhutan is its special attention to peace, prosperity and happiness for its people. This research focuses on the expenditure inequality for 2007 and 2012 using various measurements including Gini Coefficients, Theil Indices and Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. The results show that “between” rather than “within” inequality is the major factor contributing to the overall ineq...

Article history: Received 7 February 2014 Received in revised form 27 July 2014 Accepted 28 July 2014 Available online 5 August 2014 This paper discusses the issue of informal employment and its effect on the income distribution in China using datasets from the China Urban Labour Surveys of 2005 and 2010. Based on a new definition of informal employment, we estimated the proportion of informal ...

Decomposing Differences in the First Moment We propose a simple methodology for decomposing differences in the first moment into characteristics and coefficients effects. This methodology provides a way to apply the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to a non-linear function for both aggregate and detailed decompositions. JEL Classification: C20, J70

The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique is widely used to identify and quantify the separate contributions of group differences in measurable characteristics, such as education, experience, marital status, and geographical differences to racial and gender gaps in outcomes. The technique cannot be used directly, however, if the outcome is binary and the coefficients are from a logit or probit...

The Sexual Orientation Wage Gap: The Role of Occupational Sorting, Human Capital, and Discrimination Using data from the 2000 U.S. Census, we document and explore three alternative explanations for the sexual orientation wage gap: occupational sorting, human capital differences, and discrimination. We find lesbian women earn more than their heterosexual counterparts irrespective of marital stat...

Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition for Tobit Models In this paper, a decomposition method for Tobit-models is derived, which allows the differences in a censored outcome variable between two groups to be decomposed into a part that is explained by differences in observed characteristics and a part attributable to differences in the estimated coefficients. The method is applied to a decomposition of t...

After inequalities in the health sector are measured, a natural next step is to seek to explain them. Why do inequalities in health exist between the poor and better-off in many countries despite health systems explicitly aimed at eliminating inequalities in access to health care? Why is inequality in the incidence of health sector subsidies greater in one country than in another? Why has the d...

Religious Minorities and Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from Rural West Bengal Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India concentration of religi...