University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas Inequality Project

University of Texas at Austin
Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs


About UTIP


UTIP is a small research group concerned with measuring and explaining movements of inequality in wages and earnings and patterns of industrial change around the world.

We believe we can establish reasonably reliable relationships between these measures and the broader concepts of inequality, such as income inequality.

Our work has emphasized the use of Theil's T statistic to compute inequality indexes from industrial, regional and sectoral data. The methods we use to measure inequality are presented in the tutorials section and the working paper series section. Macros to facilitate the calculations can be downloaded from the tools section.

We produce data sets on pay inequality at the global level, at the national level including for Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, China, India, and Russia, and at the regional level for Europe. We have also used pay inequality as an instrument to estimate measures of household income inequality, for a large panel of countries from 1963 through 2014. This new global data set has over 4,000 country-year observations. All data sets are available in the data section.

UTIP receives financial support mainly from the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Business/Government Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin. We have received past support from the Ford Foundation,the Carnegie Scholars Program and the Institute for New Economic Thinking.