Matteo Targa
I am a post-doctoral researcher at Università di Roma Tre and associated researcher with the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the GC Wealth Project.
I work on Labor Economics with a specific attention to causes and consequences of economic inequality. In my most recent works, I focus on firm-level dimensions of wage inequality.
As part of the GC Wealth Project, I assume the role of overseeing the Wealth Inequality Trend Section.
I graduated at the Berlin School of Economics (BSE). During the PhD, I worked as research associate in the Perceptions of Inequalities and Justice in Europe (PIJE) project at SOEP/DIW Berlin.
At Roma Tre University, I am a member of the Inequality in Rome Research Group where I co-organize the Inequality in Rome Seminar Series.
e-mail: matteo.targa@uniroma3.it
Twitter: @MatteoTarga
Research
Working Papers:
Abstract: In this paper I allow firms to set differential wage policies to different occupational classes, i.e. managers, white and blue collar workers. Using administrative data from the Veneto region in Italy, I show that within the same firm different occupations receive different firm premia, meaning that high-type firms are not ‘equally good’ for all employees. Specifically, the highest-paying firms for a given occupational group are likely to be among the least advantageous for the other employees. Eventually, I provide evidence that within-firm wage differentials between white and blue collar workers increased in the 1990s with respect to the 1980s.
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J. König, M. Longmuir, J.Seebauer, M. Targa; Workers' Earnings Losses after Firm Shutdown.
First draft available soon!
Abstract: This paper studies firm shutdowns and wage mobility in Italy’s Veneto region using the universe of social security data from 1982 to 2001. We follow Bonhomme, Lamadon, and Manresa (2019) to uncover workers’ types and firm classes finding these to be remarkably stable over time. Based on these, we measure responses to firm shutdowns across and within workers’ types using an event-study framework. We find the aggregate wage loss directly following a shutdown to be 6% of the daily wage, which halves after six years. This aggregate trajectory masks stark heterogeneity: the top types face initial losses of 6.7%, which increase to 10.9% after six years. Conversely, initial losses for bottom types are 4.4%, which become statistically insignificant after six years. A large share of this disproportionate effect for top types is driven by matching with lower-ranked firms post-shutdown.
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Earlier version available as LIS Working papers 796, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
Abstract: The Routine-Biased Technological Change hypothesis (RBTC) by Acemoglu and Autor (2011) suggests that automation processes have substituted workers operating middle-skilled routine tasks. Consequently, the relative demand for complementary non-routine occupations, i.e., low-skilled service and high-skilled abstract jobs, has increased. These changes in the labor force composition imply a polarization of jobs along the skills distribution. An aspect of high socio-economic and political relevance is its distributional implications. Here we quantify the polarization of jobs and its importance for earnings distributions using a novel dataset of 35 countries. We find strong evidence for job polarization in most countries but no clear-cut distributional consequences. This weak link stems from variation within rather than between occupational classes and heterogeneous intensities of de-routinization along the earnings distribution.
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M. Targa, L. Yang; The Impact of Communist Party Membership on Wealth Distribution and Accumulation in Urban China
R&R World Development
Media Coverage: The Economist (July 8th 2023)
Availbale as Stone Center Working Paper Series. no. 66
Abstract: In the context of China, there is growing interests among economists and other social scientists in measuring the economic returns of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) membership. Existing literature mostly focuses on the estimation of returns of party membership on labour wages and earnings. In this paper, we aim to fill the gap in the literature by presenting the first comprehensive study about the wealth gap evolution in urban China between CCP and non-CCP households since the 1990s. We apply unconditional quantile regression (UQR) to describe the heterogeneity in the returns of party membership along the wealth distribution. Our results show that the \textit{average} wealth gap between CCP and non-CCP household remained substantial and stable between 1995 and 2017; however, the returns structure of political membership has deeply changed over time. While in the 1990s the highest wealth advantages, in relative terms, for party members were concentrated at the middle of the distribution, today is the lower class that benefits the most. We show that privatization of the housing market, especially after the housing reform, granted even access to housing wealth to both CCP and non-CCP families, reducing the differences in the middle and at the top of the wealth distribution. However, strong differences between the housing investment of CCP and non-CCP households at the bottom of the net wealth distribution persist still today, where CCP are found a) to be more likely to own housing real estate assets than non-CCP households and (b) the houses that they own are more valuable. Eventually, using a balanced household panel from 2013 to 2017, we are able to trace wealth accumulation at the household level. Our findings show CCP households accumulate wealth faster than non-CCP ones due to larger capital gains, and such differences are increasing along the net wealth distribution.
Published Papers:
Published in European Societies (2022), 1-25.
(Limited) free download version available.
Abstract: Women tend to evaluate their own pay more favorably than men. Contented women are speculated to not seek higher wages, thus the ‘paradox of the contented female worker’ may contribute to persistent gender pay differences. We extend the literature on gender differences in pay evaluations by investigating fairness evaluations of own earnings and underlying conceptions of fair earnings, providing a closer link to potential subsequent wage demands than previous literature. Using European Social Survey (2018/2019) data, we find no evidence that women evaluate their own earnings more favorably than men. In 15 out of the 28 analyzed countries, women actually report more intense levels of perceived unfairness. Studying fair markups on unfair earnings, i.e. the relative distance between the earnings received and earnings considered fair, we find that women report the same, if not lower, fair markups compared to men in most countries; thus indicating limited potential for perceived unfairness as a driving force to reduce the gender pay gap in Europe.
Data:
Morelli, S., Asher, T., Di Biase, F., Disslbacher, F., Flores, I., Johnson, A. R., Rella, G., Schechtl, M., Subioli, F., Targa, M.,; The GC Wealth Project Data Warehouse v.1
Availbale as Stone Center Working Paper Series. no. 75
Abstract: The GC Wealth Project, a central project of the Graduate Center’s Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, is a multi-year effort aimed at expanding and consolidating access to the most up-to-date research and information on wealth, wealth inequalities, and wealth transfers and related tax policies, across countries and over time. The GC Wealth Project website — first launched in June 2023 — is organized around two main components: a data warehouse of gathered and novel data that can be visualized in a variety of ways through the interactive dashboard, and a Digital Library of Research on Wealth Inequality. Both are designed to provide researchers, policymakers, journalists, and others interested in wealth and wealth taxation with open, unlimited access to an array of high-quality information and resources. All of the data, including the tailored visualizations that users can create using the interactive dashboard, can be exported.
Early stage projects:
J. Adriaans, S. Bohmann, S. Liebig, M. Targa; Normative and subjective fairness evaluations of own earnings – A case study for women in Germany.
Abstract: The following paper investigates the evolution of normative and subjective fairness evaluations of own earnings for women employed in Germany between 2005 and 2019 using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Based on P. Hufe, R. Kanbut, A. Peichel (2022) we define the normatively fair earnings distribution as the income level that simultaneously guarantees equality of opportunity between different circumstances types in a society and freedom from poverty. We, then, define subjectively fair earnings as the level of labor earnings that surveyed workers declared to be fair for their current job. Because of large and persistent earnings gaps, according to our estimates, about 90% of employed women in Germany earn lower earnings than what considerable normatively fair. Among these women, about 40% recognized to have unfairly low earnings. Once asked to declare the level of own earnings to be considered subjectively fair, about 70% of the women in our sample declared subjective earnings levels lower than the normative accounts. While the gap between subjective and normative earnings evaluations remains substantial, we document that it has steadily reduced over the past 14 years.
Reports: