Please join us next Wednesday, February 26, at 11 in the library and on Zoom for a presentation by Visiting Researcher James Ziliak entitled “Unpacking Income Inequality: A Trans-Atlantic Comparison over Thirty Years.” Click here for the abstract of his talk and two background articles (Changing Labor Market and Income Inequality).
Ziliak is Professor and Carol Martin Gatton Endowed Chair in Microeconomics in the Department of Economics at the University of Kentucky, where he has been since 2002. He is also the founding director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Poverty Research (2002-Present) and the Founding Executive Director of the Kentucky Federal Statistical Research Data Center (2016-2020).
Ziliak holds a PhD and an MA in Economics from Indiana University and a BS in Economics and a BA in Sociology from Purdue University. He was the recipient of the Richard A. Musgrave Prize for Best Paper published by the National Tax Journal in2022 (with Maggie Jones, U.S. Census Bureau).
At RSF he is working on a project investigating inequality in labor market outcomes of men and women across the life cycle, focusing on the roles of changing employment, hours of work, and the wage levels of workers on inequality. He is using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey from 1976-2018 to better understand life cycle gender wage inequality among different birth cohorts across income groups. He is exploring three possible mechanisms for patterns of life cycle gender wage gaps among cohorts: gender and education group-specific shocks common to cohorts such as legislative and judicial changes affecting access to employment; changes in life cycle timing of child rearing across cohorts; and the rise of full-time work among women. The project aims to provide new estimates of earnings inequality across the working life between gender, race, and education.