Achievement

INEQUALITY AMONG AMERICAN FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN. From 1975-2005, the variance in incomes of US families with children increased by two-thirds. In attempting to explain this trend, labor market studies emphasize the rising pay of college grads, while demographers typically highlight family structural changes across time. Prof Bruce Western, student Deirdre Bloome, and C. Percheski join these lines of research by conceiving of income inequality as the joint product of the distribution of earnings in the labor market and the pooling of incomes in families. They develop this framework with a decomposition of family income inequality. Their analysis shows that disparities in education and single parenthood contributed to income inequality, but rising educational attainment and women’s employment offset these effects. Most of the increase in family income inequality was due to increasing within-group inequality, which was widely shared across family types and levels of schooling.