A Semiparametric Analysis of Conditional Income Distributions

Abstract

We explore the application of structured additive distributional regression for the analysis of conditional income distributions in Germany following the reunification using the German Socio Economic Panel (SOEP) database. This methodology allows us to explore both between and within income inequality at a highly disaggregated level. Using a bootstrapped version of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, we find that conditional personal income distributions can generally be modelled using a mixture distribution entailing the three parameter Dagum distribution.