This paper points to flaws in Gini decompositions by income sources and population subgroups and to common pitfalls in the interpretation of decomposition results, focusing on methods within the framework of Rao (1969). We argue that within this framework Gini elasticities may provide the only...

We develop an assignment model of automation. Each of a continuum of tasks of variable complexity is assigned to either capital or one of a continuum of labor skills. We characterize conditions for interior automation, whereby tasks of intermediate complexity are assigned to capital. Interior...

Recent research has found that macroeconomic survey forecasts of uncertainty exhibit several deficiencies, such as horizon-dependent biases and lower accuracy than simple unconditional uncertainty forecasts. We examine the inflation uncertainty forecasts from the Bank of England, the Banco...

The Pareto distribution has been used to describe firm sizes in many theoretical models for its convenience and empirical validity. We provide estimates of the Pareto parameters across industries and investigate the determinants of the shape of the firm size distribution in Brazil. The Pareto...

Multivariate distributional forecasts have become widespread in recent years. To assess the quality of such forecasts, suitable evaluation methods are needed. In the univariate case, calibration tests based on the probability integral transform (PIT) are routinely used. However, multivariate...

Health expenditure data almost always include extreme values, implying that the underlying distribution has heavy tails. This may result in infinite variances as well as higher-order moments and bias the commonly used least squares methods. To accommodate extreme values, we propose an estimation...

Top distributions of income and wealth are still incompletely measured in many national statistics, particularly when using survey data. This paper develops the technique of incorporating the joint distributional relationship to enhance the estimation of these two top distributions by using the...