Assessing the Effects of Wives' Earnings on Family Income Inequality
指出，评估妻子收入对不平等的影响需与反事实分布比较，而非依赖基尼系数分解。基于1979和1989年美国数据，发现妻子收入降低了不平等。
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. © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology