DECOMPOSITION OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PERSONAL INCOMES DISTRIBUTIONS IN POLAND

In this paper we study differences between personal incomes distributions in Poland in 2002 and 2012. The empirical data have been collected within the Household Budget Survey project. We used the Machado & Mata decomposition, which utilizes quantile regression. This method allowed us to investigate differences between income distributions in the whole range of values, going beyond simple average value decomposition. We evaluated influence of person’s attributes on the differences of incomes distributions in 2002 and 2012. By decomposing the differences into the explained and unexplained components we got information about their causes. The differences described by the explained part are caused by different characteristics of samples. The unexplained part shows differences caused by the changes of attribute importance.