Labour Markets & Inequality: Unemployment, Wage Floors, Lorenz Curves & the Gini Coefficient

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn fictional survey counts for six regions into labour force, participation, unemployment and employment rates, pool them correctly for the whole country and see how discouraged workers lower the unemployment rate without anyone finding a job.
• Turn a year of fictional worker flows into monthly separation and job-finding rates, compute the steady-state unemployment rate s ÷ (s + f) month by month and for the pooled year, and test what faster job matching would do.
• Solve a linear labour market for the equilibrium wage and employment, impose a fictional wage floor, measure the jobs lost and the unemployment it creates, and split the gains into worker surplus, employer surplus and deadweight loss.
• Deflate eleven years of fictional nominal wages into real wages, index them against labour productivity, measure the wage–productivity gap and the change in the labour share in percentage points, and chart the two indices.
• Find the quintile cut-offs of 40 fictional household incomes with PERCENTILE.INC, sort every household into its quintile, measure the income shares of the poorest and richest fifth and compute the S80/S20 ratio.
• Turn fictional income totals per decile into income shares and cumulative shares, read off what the poorest half receives, compute the Palma ratio and draw the Lorenz curve against the line of equality.
• Compute the Gini coefficient of two fictional regions from decile data with the trapezoid method, add the top-10 % share and the D10/D1 decile ratio, and decide which region is more unequal.
• Apply a fictional budget-neutral flat tax with an equal cash transfer to ten income deciles, compute disposable income and net gains, measure the Gini before and after and chart market against disposable income.