标题：Reconciling Workless Measures at the Individual and Household Level. Theory and Evidence from the United States, Britain, Germany, Spain and Australia
期刊名称：Discussion Papers in Economics / Department of Economics, Royal Holloway
出版年度：2004
卷号：2004
出版社：University of London
摘要：Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer
conflicting signals about labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the
extent of any disparity, (polarisation), in the signals stemming from individual and
household-based measures of worklessness and apply this index to data from 5 countries over
25 years. Built around a comparison of the actual household workless rate with that which
would occur if work were randomly distributed over household occupants, we show that in
all the countries we examine, there has been a growing disparity between the individual and
household based workless measures. The polarisation count can be decomposed to identify
which household groups are exposed to workless concentrations and can also be used to test
which individual characteristics account for any excess worklessness among these household
groups. We show that the incidence and magnitude of polarisation varies widely across
countries, but that in all countries polarisation has increased. For each country most of the
discrepancies between the individual and household workless counts stem from withinhousehold
factors, rather than from changing household composition.
关键词：Workless households, Inequality, Distribution of work, Polarisation,
Worklessness
