A longitudinal and distributional study of wage polarization in Sweden from 1991 to 2013 describing cohort and educational predictors

ABSTRACT

In my study, I describe wage polarization in the Swedish labor market between and within cohorts of educational groups from 1991 to 2013. My sample consists of wage earners aged 18–65 from the Swedish longitudinal integration database for health insurance and labor market studies (LISA). I used relative distribution methods and panel data analysis. The relative wage distribution indicated polarization among birth and age cohorts. However, polarization decreased in magnitude over the study period. The pattern remained even with the predicted values. A regression analysis indicated that birth cohort moderates the difference between educational groupings at various quantiles of the wage distribution.

KEYWORDS:

• Wage polarization
• Educational groups
• Birth cohort
• Age cohort

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the anonymousreviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful for comments by Tomas Berglund on an early draft of the paper.

Notes

¹ Note that tabloids use middle-class jobs to refer to middle wage jobs

² A double axis tends to obscure the interpretation. Therefore, I caution against the interpretation of the double axis.

³ I use explanation to indicate a hypothetical description of data-generating processes.