Statistical problems in modelling personal income distributions include estimation procedures, testing and model choice. Typically, the parameters of a given model are estimated by classical procedures such as maximum likelihood and least squares estimators. Unfortunately, the classical methods...

Choosing between two income distribution models typically involves testing two non-tested hypotheses, that is hypotheses such that one cannot be obtained as a special or limiting case of the other. Cox (1961, 1962) proposed a classical testing procedure based on the comparison of the maximised...

The economic analysis of income distribution and related topics makes extensive use of dominance criteria to draw inferences about welfare comparisons. However it is possible that - just as some inequality statistics can be very sensitive to extreme values - conclusions drawn from empirical...

We consider the problem of targeting benefits when the incomes of families are not accurately observable by the public authorities. By income uncertainty it is meant that the decision-maker cannot ascertain an applicantamp;apos's income, but that he can assign probabilities with respect to the...

We develop two simple measures of how much inequality is explained by individual population characteristics or groups of characteristics, analogous to R2 in regression analysis. We investigate the measuresamp;apos' empirical implementation using several alternative theoretically consistent...