HANDBOOK OF LABOR ECONOMICS, VOL 4A

4 Going beyond the Mean—Distributional Methods

Developing new decomposition methods for distributional statistics other than the mean has been an active research area over the last 15 years. In this section, we discuss a number of procedures that have been suggested for decomposing general distributional statistics. We focus on the case of the aggregate decomposition, though some of the suggested methods can be extended to the case of the detailed decomposition, which we discuss in Section 5. We begin by looking at the simpler case of a variance decomposition. The decomposition is obtained by extending the classic analysis of variance approach (based on a between/within group approach) to a general case with covariates . We then turn to new ...