The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Assessing the Effects of Wives' Earnings on Family Income Inequality
Abstract
We argue that the effect of wives' earnings can be assessed meaningfully only by comparing the observed distribution of income with a reference distribution. The components of the standard decomposition of the Gini coefficient have no implicit reference distribution and therefore should not be interpreted as a measure of the effect of an income source on inequality. We suggest several intuitive counterfactual reference distributions and illustrate their use with 1979 and 1989 U.S. data. We conclude that wives' earnings reduced inequality in that the income distribution would have been less equal in their absence. Alternative measures of the impact have mixed results.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality
Greenwood, J., Guner, N., Kocharkov, G., & Santos, C. (2014) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.104.5.348 · Cited by 411
Educational Assortative Mating and Household Income Inequality
Eika, L., Mogstad, M., & Zafar, B. (2019) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/702018 · Cited by 282
Metadata
- Authors
- Cancian, M., & Reed, D.
- Venue
- Review of Economics and Statistics
- Publisher
- MIT Press - Journals
- Published
- 1998-02
- Volume
- 80
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 73-79
- ISSN
- 0034-6535 (ISSN-L)
- 1530-9142
- OpenAlex
- W2078668968
- Cited by
- 178
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 30.16
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Assessing the Effects of Wives' Earnings on Family Income Inequality. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1162/003465398557348
- The paper
- Cancian, M., & Reed, D. (1998). Assessing the Effects of Wives' Earnings on Family Income Inequality. Review of Economics and Statistics. https://doi.org/10.1162/003465398557348
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
